Pop Quiz, 2025 Edition: What Do These Things Cost Today?
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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8 Comments. Leave new
Quiz Grade: Ffffffantastically bad.
Score: 5
Percentage: 50%
Hey, my glass is half full thank you very much!! 🙂
Quiz Grade: D
Score: 6
Percentage: 60%
Not responsible for anything budget-related, so most answers were “best guess” based on rumour and conjecture (and a lot of “we don’t want to” undertones) from those who are responsible for budgets and spending
Quiz Grade: C
Score: 7
Percentage: 70%
Hey, I got the AWS and Licensing questions right! This was awesome. You forget about these costs when working deep inside an enterprise. good stuff
Quiz Grade: B
Score: 8
Percentage: 80%
Not too bad I missed the costing on Azure and Amazon
I am not responsible for purchasing anything really. I just tell people that their SQL sucks or they really need to have more server resources than my laptop has.
The price for SQL Standard now is absolutely and utterly insane – it comes with a RAM limit less than my desktop has!
When you factor in the overall business impact of bad database performance then your consulting rate is a bargain!
An old story that a very good consultant told me many years ago. He got a phone call from a client that asked him if he could come to a meeting with the dev and IT groups because they want to consult with him. He said, sure but can you tell me a bit about what this meeting will be about? The manager that called him told him that they developed a new application and they are suppose to deploy it to production soon, and they are debating regarding the amount of RAM that they should use. They are considering 2 options so they want to console with him. The consultant told them that he can make the decision very simple for them and told them – “Take the higher number. The difference between the cost of those 2 options, is less then the payment of the 2 hours that we will discuss it”.