QUESTIONS EVERY
MANAGER ASKS
BEFORE HIRING.

It's a continuous database management service by a team of Senior DBAs operating remotely from our controlled facility. It's not occasional support — it's permanent administration with contractual SLA, 24/7 NOC monitoring, monthly reports, and complete environment documentation. We take full or partial ownership of database operations, as defined in the contract.

Generic IT support fixes problems when they appear — of any nature. HTI's Remote DBA is exclusive database specialization: proactive monitoring, configuration management, continuous tuning, capacity planning, and incident prevention. Our team doesn't handle networking, desktops, or generic servers. We handle exclusively databases — which makes us much faster and more effective in this domain.

Yes. The Remote DBA is a medium-term engagement with a minimum period of 12 months. This is for a technical reason: proper environment onboarding, complete documentation, and operation stabilization take the first few weeks. A shorter contract wouldn't allow us to deliver the service with the quality we demand of ourselves.

Yes. The Remote DBA can be hired to take over all operations or just part of them. A common model is high-level support: your internal DBA handles day-to-day tasks and HTI takes on the more complex issues, 24/7 monitoring, and coverage during off-hours. The scope is custom-defined in the contract.

Yes. We support on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments. We support Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Azure SQL, Google Cloud SQL, Oracle Cloud, and others. The fact that the database is in the cloud doesn't eliminate the need for specialized administration — the same performance, security, and configuration problems exist in any environment.

Relational (RDBMS): MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, IBM Informix, SAP Sybase, SAP HANA. NoSQL: MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase, Redis, Neo4J. Managed cloud: Amazon RDS, Aurora, Azure SQL, Oracle Cloud, Google Cloud SQL. Contact us to verify if your specific technology is on the list.

For emergency support (standalone service): 30 minutes during business hours (Mon–Fri, 9am–6pm) and 2 hours outside those hours, including weekends and holidays. For clients with an active Remote DBA contract: SLAs are contractually defined and vary according to the environment's criticality level — and can be stricter than the standards above.

Our NOC (Network Operations Center) operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Critical alerts trigger immediate activation of the on-call team, regardless of time. For Remote DBA clients, this coverage is included in the contract. For non-clients, standalone emergency support is available 24/7 with a 2-hour SLA outside business hours.

The client receives active notification when the incident is detected — they don't wait to notice the problem to know it's being handled. During resolution, updates are sent at contractually defined intervals. After resolution, an incident report documents root cause, actions taken, and recommendations to prevent recurrence.

Yes. Remote DBA clients receive a monthly report with: incident summary, preventive actions executed, performance metrics, capacity planning status, and improvement recommendations. The report is delivered in documented format and serves as input for infrastructure decisions.

Yes. The contract defines KPIs relevant to your context: uptime, critical query response time, restore time, incident rate, among others. HTI also monitors behavioral metrics — not just CPU and disk — such as data ingestion patterns and access attempts to protected objects, via our proprietary tool DBSnoop.

Via secure encrypted remote connection (dedicated VPN or SSH tunnel). Access is granted by the client, with database credentials specific to HTI — usually with DBA permissions, but without access to business data itself. All access is audited and logged. The access scope is defined in the contract and can be reviewed at any time.

Database administration work operates at the structural level — configuration, performance, indexes, replication, backup. There's no need to access table contents for 99% of DBA activities. When exceptionally necessary (e.g., diagnosis of specific corrupted data), this is done with the client's knowledge and authorization. A confidentiality agreement (NDA) is available and is standard practice.

Yes. NDA is standard practice for all Remote DBA and consulting contracts. Our NDA template can be sent during the proposal phase, or you can submit your company's template for review.

Our consulting includes LGPD compliance auditing: mapping of stored personal data, access control verification, identification of unencrypted sensitive data, and remediation recommendations. For Remote DBA clients, we monitor access to sensitive data and generate audit logs that can be used as compliance evidence. Our operation is also subject to the same LGPD requirements as a data processor.

All DBAs managing client environments work on-site in a restricted-access room. The room has 24h surveillance cameras, biometric access exclusive to the DBA team, and a dedicated rack. No production environment management work is done from residential or uncontrolled locations.

Upon contract termination, all HTI access to the environment is revoked and documented. All documentation produced during the contract (scripts, topology, configurations, incident history) is delivered to the client in organized format. No environment information is retained by HTI after termination.

1. Initial technical conversation (30 min with Senior DBA) — no commitment. 2. Environment diagnosis for scope definition. 3. Customized technical proposal with SLAs, scope, and investment. 4. Contract and NDA signing. 5. Onboarding: complete environment mapping, documentation, and monitoring setup. 6. Active operation from onboarding completion (usually 1–2 weeks).

Typical onboarding takes 1 to 2 weeks, depending on environment complexity. During this period, our team maps the entire infrastructure, documents configurations, sets up monitoring, and learns the environment. Full operation begins after onboarding completion.

No. Onboarding is done with the environment in normal operation. Metrics collection and infrastructure mapping are performed non-intrusively, with zero impact on transactional operations. This is one of the principles of our RAA methodology (T1 — Surgical Collection).

This is exactly the problem that the HTI model solves — and that an internal DBA creates. All environment documentation (scripts, configurations, topology, incident history, access) is HTI's intellectual property as a company, not any individual professional's. When a team DBA is replaced, the replacement has immediate access to the entire documented environment history. The client never loses accumulated knowledge.

Yes. Provider transition is done in parallel — HTI onboards while the previous provider is still active. Responsibility migration is done gradually, with confirmation of each layer before terminating the previous contract. No maintenance window is needed for the transition itself.

Our operation is based in São Paulo, SP. We serve clients across Brazil. For international clients, consulting and Remote DBA are performed fully remotely — the timezone is contractually agreed upon to ensure adequate coverage.

Generally, yes — especially when you consider total cost. A Senior DBA in São Paulo costs between R$ 15,000 and R$ 25,000 per month in salary + charges. That's without FGTS, vacation, 13th salary, benefits, continuous training, tool licenses, and termination risk. HTI's Remote DBA delivers a team (not a person), with 24/7 coverage, proprietary tools, and contractual SLA — usually for less than a single internal Senior DBA.

Investment is defined by service scope — number of servers, technologies, SLA level, and required availability. We don't have a public price list because each contract is customized. The proposal is sent after the initial technical conversation and real scope mapping. No surprises: everything is detailed in the proposal before signing.

This varies by contract. In some cases, onboarding is included in the monthly investment; in others, it's charged separately as it's a diagnosis and documentation project with specific deliverables. This is clearly specified in the proposal.

ROI can be calculated on three axes: (1) Avoided cost — compare the Remote DBA cost with the cost of an internal Senior DBA under CLT + benefits; (2) Avoided downtime — one hour of downtime in critical systems costs between R$ 200K and R$ 1M depending on the sector (Gartner); (3) Avoided hardware and licenses — our Assessment identified R$ 2.5M in unnecessary licenses and hardware for a single client. I can help you do this math for your context in the initial technical conversation.

Sustaining is continuous — proactive maintenance, monitoring, optimization, and problem prevention. Support is reactive — resolving a specific problem when it occurs. HTI offers both: Remote DBA is continuous sustaining; Emergency Support is reactive support for those without a prior contract.

It's continuous supervision of availability, performance, security, and database behavior. It goes far beyond CPU and memory. Our tool DBSnoop monitors: service availability, stability, replication, disk growth, memory and processing consumption, but also behavioral patterns — data ingestion, access attempts to protected objects, and anomalous usage. Alerts are configured by severity and trigger the team immediately.

Monitoring is continuous and operational — real-time supervision to detect and resolve problems. Auditing is periodic and formal — detailed review of data, access, and processes to ensure compliance, security, and evidence for regulators. HTI offers both: monitoring as part of Remote DBA and auditing as a standalone or periodic consulting service.

It's a complete technical diagnosis of the database environment. In 4 stages: T1 — Metrics collection (no impact on operations); T2 — Microscopic analysis of performance, bottlenecks, and security; T3 — Tuning and fine adjustments; T4 — Delivery of the RAA (Environment Analysis Report) with prioritized roadmap. Result: you know exactly the real state of the database, what's wrong, and what to do — in priority order.

Health Check is tactical and immediate — focused on current health, symptoms, and short-term fixes. Assessment is strategic and architectural — deep analysis of topology, scalability, HA, Disaster Recovery, and compliance for the long term. The Health Check answers "what's wrong now?" The Assessment answers "how does the environment need to evolve?"

It depends on the contracted scope. The Health Check delivers diagnosis and roadmap — implementation can be done by the client's internal team or by HTI as a separate project. For more complex projects (migration, model refactoring, HA implementation), HTI executes the implementation as part of the consulting scope. This is specified in the proposal.

Yes. We migrate between any RDBMS: MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, IBM DB2, Sybase, MongoDB, among others. The migration includes: compatibility analysis, migration strategy, transformation scripts, testing in staging environment, rollback plan, and execution with minimum downtime.

Go to: our WhatsApp support channel. Describe the problem in one line — the DBA who responds will ask the necessary technical questions. We don't need an elaborate report to start the service. Response SLA: 30 minutes during business hours (Mon–Fri, 9am–6pm), 2 hours outside those hours. No prior contract, no registration, no bureaucracy.

Yes. Emergency support is a standalone service available to any company, with or without a prior contract. Payment is made by hour package via credit card or PayPal before the start of service.

Any database incident, including: database won't start, data corruption, critical performance, production deadlock, replication failure, emergency restore, server crash, intermittent instability, explosive disk growth, runaway queries, InnoDB crash, out of memory, total lock, compromised permissions. We handle L1 to L3 in MySQL and L1 to L2 in other technologies.

Over 596 emergency cases have been handled and cataloged. This knowledge base is what allows us to act with speed and precision — we're not improvising, we're applying accumulated knowledge from hundreds of similar situations.

We don't offer an absolute resolution guarantee — any company that does is lying. What we guarantee is: (1) senior team on the problem within SLA, (2) precise technical diagnosis of the cause, (3) all possible actions within the contracted hours scope. In over 596 cases, most were resolved within the first hour of service.

HTI AI is our Artificial Intelligence vertical applied to business — independent from the database vertical. We develop products and applications where AI is the foundation, not an add-on: autonomous agents, LLMs trained in your business context, intelligent automation, and strategic AI consulting. Engineering guided by MIT-trained specialists.

They are independent verticals. The database uses AI internally in our monitoring product (DBSnoop), but the HTI AI vertical serves clients who want to build AI-based products and processes — it's not related to database administration. The same clients can hire both verticals, but they are distinct contracts and teams.

Via WhatsApp — for those who prefer direct conversation and quick response. The first conversation is technical, no sales pitch, no commitment.