Councils · rates, property and ERP systems · Australian DBAs

SQL Server support for local government

Rates, property, planning, animal registration and payroll all sit on a database somewhere in the council, usually with one systems administrator covering the lot. Remote DBA cover, published pricing, and no procurement surprise — from $1,500 a month.

Free 20-point health check Call 1800 431 416

A council runs an enterprise estate on a small-business IT team. Rates and property, planning and development applications, asset and works management, animal registration, libraries, payroll and the finance ledger — most of it on SQL Server, much of it on vendor-supported applications, and typically supported by a handful of people who also run the desktop fleet and the phones.

That is a workable arrangement until it needs a specialist. A corrupt page in the rates database the week before a levy run, a property system that will not restore into test, or an upgrade a vendor has made conditional on a SQL Server version nobody has budgeted for — none of those are failures of the team. They are the predictable gap between a generalist estate and specialist work.

What we are usually called about

The council systems that sit on SQL Server

Almost all of them, and almost always from several different vendors — which is the actual difficulty.

Rates and property

The system the revenue depends on, with hard external deadlines that do not move. Levy runs and valuation loads are the two windows where performance problems become visible to the executive.

Planning and development

Statutory clocks, public-facing portals and document stores. Usually integrated with the website, which makes a database outage a service outage residents can see.

Asset and works management

Spatial data, work orders and long-lived asset registers — often the largest databases in the council and the least frequently reviewed.

Finance, payroll and HR

Pay runs and end-of-month have the same property as a levy run: a fixed date, and no appetite for the word "degraded".

Reporting and the annual report

SSRS and data extracts feeding statutory reporting, which tends to reveal every data quality problem accumulated over the year, all in one fortnight.

The system nobody owns

Every council has one — a database behind a service that matters, built by someone who has left, running on a server nobody wants to reboot. We find these during the assessment, routinely.

For the procurement file

What makes this easy to put through a council procurement

Public sector procurement rewards things that can be written down and compared. Most of this is already published, which is deliberate.

Prices are published on the website, so a quote can be checked against a public figure rather than taken on trust
No lock-in contract: monthly plans run on a rolling basis with no minimum term and no exit fee, which avoids a multi-year commitment going to council for approval
An Australian company with an ABN and an ACN, contracting under Australian law, with a Melbourne head office
Database access is held by Australian-based DBAs only, and the access terms can be written into the agreement rather than cited from a web page
The ACSC Essential Eight patch-currency control is the one an ageing SQL Server version fails — the assessment reports the version and patch level of every instance in writing
Project work is quoted as a fixed price after the assessment, so a capital request is based on a scoped number rather than an estimate

Getting started

How a council engagement usually starts

Usually with one instance and no money, because that is the sensible way to find out whether this is worth doing.

One free health check

Twenty checkpoints against the instance that worries you most — typically rates or finance. Read-only scripts you run yourself, a written report, and no obligation. It is a legitimate way to get an independent opinion without raising a purchase order.

A written finding list, prioritised

Rated findings with the script output behind each one, ordered by what is actually at risk. This is the document that turns "the database feels slow" into something a manager can act on and a budget can be written against.

Fix what is urgent, as scoped work

Quoted as a fixed price against the findings, so there is no open-ended time-and-materials exposure to explain. Where nothing urgent is found, we say so — about half the time, that is the outcome.

Then a plan, if it is worth it

A monthly plan makes sense when the estate genuinely needs ongoing cover. Where your team is managing fine and only needs an escalation path, hourly consultancy is cheaper and we will tell you that.

Start with the instance that worries you most

One free 20-point health check per organisation, on one SQL Server instance. Read-only, no access required, written report within 3 business days — and no obligation to engage us afterwards.

Book the free health check

Published 9 October 2026

FAQ

Common questions

Yes. The work is remote and we support councils across every Australian state and territory, plus New Zealand. Being Melbourne-based means Australian Eastern business hours and the option of an on-site visit in the Melbourne metropolitan area; it is not a requirement for the service.

That is what the free 20-point health check is for. It is genuinely free, covers one instance, requires no access to your environment and commits you to nothing — so it needs no purchase order. If the findings justify work, you then have a written, independent basis for the procurement rather than a vendor claim.

Sometimes not, and we will say so. Application vendor support usually covers the application and its certified configuration — not query tuning, not your backup strategy, not the instance hosting four other systems, and rarely a 2am outage. The question worth asking your vendor is what they will do when the database is slow but the application is behaving correctly.

Onsys DBAs based in Australia, and only them. No offshore engineer holds credentials to a client database environment, on any plan. We tell you which engineers hold access before you sign and it goes into the agreement, access is through named accounts with session logging, and it is revoked the day the engagement ends.

Plan A is $1,500 per month excluding GST for up to 10 SQL Server instances — $150 per instance — with a guaranteed two-hour response at any hour and 10 professional service hours a month. Ad-hoc consultancy is $150 per hour with a four-hour minimum. Every figure is published on the pricing page, so nothing in a quote should be a surprise.