Your SQL Server estate,
built to hold under pressure.
Technical writing on running SQL Server at enterprise scale — Always On Availability Groups, patch & compliance frameworks, performance incidents, and the audits that keep your board off your back. Fifteen years defending production.
Real problems from real production environments —
not textbook scenarios.
Teams without a DBA lead
Strong DBAs individually, but nobody owns the estate — standards, on-call, escalation, or the roadmap. That gap is usually where fractional leadership models start making sense.
IT leaders facing an audit
SOX, ISO, or an internal audit flags a gap in login controls, access review, or change management. These are the remediation patterns that come up most often.
Orgs mid-migration or mid-crisis
AG synchronization lagging, replication silently breaking, or a manufacturing-line database blocking production — the kind of pressure that separates diagnosis from guesswork.
CTOs who want visibility, not surprises
A real inventory of what's out there — on-prem, Azure SQL, RDS — patch state, ownership, and risk, in a dashboard that's actually readable.
Six layers of defense, outside in.
Each layer below maps to real production work across the estate — from the outer perimeter of who can touch your data, down to the command layer that decides how the whole thing is run.
Audit Chamber
SOX and compliance-grade permission audits, login control remediation, and the documentation that satisfies an auditor on the first pass — not the third.
Garrison & Rampart
Always On Availability Group design, failover testing, and sync-latency troubleshooting — including replication setups tangled with backup tooling like Veeam log chains.
Core Vault
Blocking chains, Query Store regressions, and slow production databases — diagnosed and fixed, with root cause documented so it doesn't recur next quarter.
Deep Cellar
Backup strategy review, CDC and replication pipelines (including AWS DMS), and recovery drills that prove your RPO and RTO on paper actually hold in practice.
Sentry Line
A single source of truth for your estate — instance inventory, patch compliance, uptime, built as a real reporting model, not a spreadsheet someone forgot to update.
The Bridge
Operating model design, on-call structure, hiring support, and a follow-the-sun team framework for organizations that need DBA leadership before they need a full-time hire.
Fifteen years on the other side of the incident call.
SQL Citadel is written by someone who has spent over fifteen years inside production SQL Server environments — first as a hands-on DBA, then leading a distributed database team across four regions responsible for an enterprise-scale estate spanning on-premises, Azure SQL, and AWS RDS.
That work has meant building monitoring and inventory systems from scratch, hardening Always On Availability Groups, standing in front of auditors defending controls that were already fixed, and the quieter discipline of documenting a fix well enough that it doesn't come back next quarter.
Client identities and employer stay confidential — that's part of the deal. SQL Citadel exists to document real fixes and real incident work — not to sell a framework.
Something in your estate needs defending?
Drop a line — no deck, no upsell, just a straight answer on what's worth fixing and what isn't.