Price check on Aisle 2025.

My main consulting job is a 2-day SQL Critical Care® where I help turn around slow SQL Servers. Companies come to me because they’re not sure if it’s a hardware problem, a database configuration issue, bad app code, or what, and they’ve been getting conflicting answers from different teams.

Before you spend money on consulting, though, stop to review what things cost.

Often, I find a whole team of people who have been struggling with slow performance – only to find they’ve got less hardware than my laptop, and it would only cost a few thousand bucks to make a really dramatic difference instantly.

So let’s do a price check. Without searching the web for prices, guess how much the below things cost – and you don’t even have to guess the exact price, just put ’em into buckets for perspective. If you don’t see a form below, like if you’re reading the blog via RSS or email newsletter, you’ll need to visit my blog to take the quiz.

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SQL Server 2022 Standard, 4 CPU Cores* Under $2,000 USD $2,000-$4,000 $5,000-$10,000 Over $10,000 SQL Server 2022 Enterprise, 1 CPU Core* Under $2,000 USD $2,000-$4,000 $5,000-$10,000 Over $10,000 512GB of memory, bought outright* Under $2,000 USD $2,000-$4,000 $5,000-$10,000 Over $10,000 1TB of memory, bought outright* Under $2,000 USD $2,000-$4,000 $5,000-$10,000 Over $10,000 A mirrored pair of 4TB NVMe SSDs* Under $2,000 USD $2,000-$4,000 $5,000-$10,000 Over $10,000 One year of an 8-core, 64GB RAM, 1.9TB SSD VM in EC2 (i4i.2xlarge)* Under $2,000 USD $2,000-$4,000 $5,000-$10,000 Over $10,000 One month of an 8-core, 40GB RAM Azure Managed Instance (Gen5 Business Critical)* Under $2,000 USD $2,000-$4,000 $5,000-$10,000 Over $10,000 One week of IT employee time (say, developer, sysadmin, DBA)* Under $2,000 USD $2,000-$4,000 $5,000-$10,000 Over $10,000 One week of a team's time (5 people)* Under $2,000 USD $2,000-$4,000 $5,000-$10,000 Over $10,000 2 days of Brent's time (SQL Critical Care® consulting)* Under $2,000 USD $2,000-$4,000 $5,000-$10,000 Over $10,000 Name First Last Email Things I want Free How I Use the First Responder Kit Training Class Monday Links (SQL & tech news) Blog posts (2-4 per week) EmailThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

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