Migrations stalling
A planned move from MySQL 5.7 to 8.0 keeps surfacing incompatible keys and charset surprises. You want a second pair of eyes on the ERD before cutover weekend.
Stellenbosch · Remote-friendly
Your schema should survive the next release — not fight it
We review table designs, constraints, and SQL that powers reporting and checkout flows. You receive annotated findings, ranked fixes, and a call to walk through trade-offs with your engineers.
When teams call us
Reports that crawl
Finance exports that used to finish in minutes now time out. You need someone who reads execution plans and can separate indexing gaps from model issues.
Growing join complexity
Microservices still share one warehouse schema. New features add nullable columns and bridge tables; you want clarity on what to normalise now versus later.
Consulting engagements
All engagements
Schema design review
Structured pass over entities, keys, and migration order with written recommendations.
SQL performance review
Slow-query bundle analysis, plan review, and index suggestions tied to real workloads.
Migration readiness
Checklist-driven assessment before major version or engine changes.
From a recent schema review
“They flagged that our polymorphic association would block foreign keys on the ledger tables — something we had hand-waved in planning. The write-up ranked fixes by migration risk, which helped us schedule DDL across two sprints instead of one risky Friday night.”
— Thabo M., lead engineer, Cape Town fintech