Managed SQL Server
Last reviewed by Tyler Eastridge
AceMQ runs your SQL Server instances for you: monitoring, patching, backups with restore tests, Always On failover and the pager. We operate them in your own cloud account, virtual machines or data centre (Tier 3), or on infrastructure AceMQ runs (Tier 4). If you would rather have Microsoft run the platform, Azure SQL Managed Instance may suit you better, and the page says when.
Support quotes answered within 1 hour, by a senior engineer.
Planning a build, upgrade or migration instead? See AceMQ SQL Server consulting and services.
Customers
Partners
What's Included
No add-on pricing for incidents. No per-ticket charges. One contract covers the whole surface.
We manage monitoring of what predicts SQL Server incidents: wait statistics, blocking, log file use and log_reuse_wait_desc, availability group synchronization and send and redo queues, failed SQL Server Agent jobs, tempdb and disk headroom. Then we take the pager, so an alert reaches an engineer who knows your topology.
We manage Always On availability groups, failover cluster instances and log shipping, including replica modes, quorum and the listener. Failover is rehearsed on a schedule, and replica lag is tracked against your recovery point objective so the potential data loss is a known number.
Full, differential and log backups scheduled against your recovery objectives, restored into a scratch environment on a schedule, with DBCC CHECKDB run and its history kept for every database. Where Transparent Data Encryption is used, its certificate and keys are backed up and restore-tested too, because a backup you cannot decrypt is no backup.
Cumulative updates and security updates applied on an agreed cadence, tested on a non-production copy first, with rollback steps written down. Version upgrades, such as SQL Server 2016 or 2017 to a current release, run as projects inside the service.
Query Store and wait-statistics review, index and statistics maintenance by need rather than by calendar, parallelism and memory settings, and tempdb layout. Capacity planning is written down instead of kept in someone's head.
Logins, roles and sysadmin membership reviewed against least privilege, encryption settings checked, and security updates tracked against the exact versions you run. Access to your environment follows your change process and is logged.
Why AceMQ
Run managed SQL Server in your own account or data centre (Tier 3) when residency and compliance rules keep the data in your boundary, or have AceMQ host it (Tier 4) when you want endpoints and no infrastructure to run. Either way the operator is a SQL Server specialist working under an AceMQ contract, not a generic hosting provider.
AceMQ holds the contract, the SLA and the escalation path, and brings in partner SQL Server specialists as the work needs them. Incidents start with an engineer who has your topology and runbooks in front of them, not a ticket queue. The 15-minute P1 response is a response time, not a resolution time.
Many SQL Server incidents start in what the application does: transactions held open across a call, chatty connections, parameterised queries over skewed data. We manage the instance and also work on queries, workload patterns and connection behaviour.
Restore, failover and log-full runbooks, topology documentation and monitoring configuration are maintained as yours. If you bring operations back in-house, or move an instance between your infrastructure and ours, there is a current handover pack ready.
Cloud, Kubernetes, bare metal, hybrid, and air-gapped — including environments where you can't give us outbound network access.
The 4 tiers
Each tier moves one more responsibility from your team to AceMQ: first diagnosis, then early warning, then running the instances, then owning the platform they run on. Tiers 1 and 2 are AceMQ's SQL Server support. Tiers 3 and 4 are managed SQL Server, and they are what the rest of this page describes.
| Tier | Who holds the pager | What AceMQ does |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1: Reactive support | You | A senior SQL Server engineer responds to your tickets under the contracted SLA, with escalation and a written root-cause analysis after every P1. Access to your environment is on request, while a ticket is worked. |
| Tier 2: Proactive support | You, with AceMQ raising problems early | Tier 1, plus scheduled reviews of backups, restores, CHECKDB history, availability group health and patch level, so the problem is found in a review and not in an outage. |
| Tier 3: Managed on your infrastructure | AceMQ | AceMQ operates SQL Server in your cloud account, virtual machines or data centre: monitoring, patching, backups, failover, change execution and on-call. You keep the account, the data, the licences and the infrastructure bill. |
| Tier 4: Managed on AceMQ infrastructure | AceMQ | AceMQ hosts and operates SQL Server on infrastructure it runs, with backups, high availability and upgrades included. You get connection endpoints, not a server or an on-call rota. You bring your own SQL Server licences or we provide them; which one is settled in the quote. |
Tier 3 and Tier 4 get the same operations. What differs is where SQL Server runs and who owns the infrastructure and licences underneath it. Tell us the workload and we will recommend a tier. Tiers 1 and 2 are on the SQL Server support page.
The same four tiers cover Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ; the escalation-first option is set out in managed open-source operations.
Azure SQL Managed Instance
Azure SQL Managed Instance is Microsoft's own managed SQL Server service, and many people who search for managed SQL Server are looking for it. It is the right answer for some estates and the wrong one for others. These are the differences that decide it.
You are comfortable running in Azure and want Microsoft to run the platform. Microsoft describes it as a PaaS service that handles upgrading, patching, backups and monitoring without user involvement, with built-in high availability and close to 100 percent compatibility with the SQL Server engine, including SQL Server Agent, cross-database queries, linked servers, CLR and Service Broker. Azure Hybrid Benefit can apply existing licences with Software Assurance.
You need the operating system or the full SQL Server surface, or the data must stay outside Azure. Microsoft states that Managed Instance has no native Business Intelligence suite (Reporting Services cannot run on it), keeps backups to automated backups plus copy-only backups, does not allow physical file paths, and supports only TCP connections. SQL Server on a virtual machine or in your data centre has none of those limits.
Managed Instance always runs the latest stable engine, or one of the SQL Server 2022 or 2025 update policies. You cannot stay on a specific older build, and native backups from it restore only to another instance or to SQL Server 2022 or 2025. A managed SQL Server estate on virtual machines keeps the version and the exit under your control.
Query plans, blocking, schema design and capacity planning stay with whoever owns the workload. On Managed Instance that is your team; AceMQ can support those workloads at Tier 1 or 2 while Microsoft runs the platform. At Tier 3 or 4 a SQL Server engineer owns them too.
Sources: Microsoft Learn, What is Azure SQL Managed Instance? (updated 19 February 2026) and the Azure SQL feature comparison, checked 31 October 2026. Vendor behaviour changes, so check it before you commit. SQL Server 2016 end of life and upgrade routes
Versions
SQL Server 2016 extended support ended on 14 July 2026 and SQL Server 2017 follows on 12 October 2027 (Microsoft Learn, checked 31 October 2026). Managed operations do not change that clock, and AceMQ does not patch SQL Server. What the service does is plan the answer and run it.
SQL Server 2016: mainstream support ended 13 July 2021, extended support ended 14 July 2026. SQL Server 2017: extended support ends 12 October 2027. SQL Server 2019: 8 January 2030. SQL Server 2022: 11 January 2033. SQL Server 2025: 6 January 2036.
For SQL Server 2016, Microsoft sells Extended Security Updates through Azure Arc, and for SQL Server on Azure VMs through the SQL IaaS Agent extension, for up to three years. AceMQ handles the enrolment steps and installs them as part of patching. Microsoft supplies the updates and the licence terms.
Inventory, compatibility level testing with Query Store, a rehearsal on a restored copy, a rollback plan and a cutover window agreed with you. The old instance stays available until the new version has run a full business cycle.
SQL Server is commercial software. We do not give Microsoft licensing advice; your reseller or Microsoft does. At Tier 3 the licences are yours. At Tier 4 you can bring your own licences or have AceMQ provide them, and we settle which before we quote.
Not ready to hand over operations yet? Support and an upgrade plan come first on the support page. SQL Server support and upgrade planning
Price drivers
AceMQ does not publish a price list for managed services. A managed SQL Server quote is built from these inputs, and the written quote returns within 1 hour of your request.
How many instances you run, how many databases and how large, and which are production.
Standalone, failover cluster instance or availability group, and the recovery point and recovery time objectives that set the backup, restore and replica work.
From business hours to 24/7 on-call with the 15-minute P1 response.
At Tier 3 you pay your cloud provider and Microsoft for infrastructure and licences, and AceMQ for operations. At Tier 4 the infrastructure is part of the AceMQ quote, and the licences are either yours or supplied by AceMQ, agreed in the quote. A version upgrade, if one is due, is scoped in the quote.
Not a fit for
We would rather say so up front.
AceMQ is a specialist service with a contract and senior engineers, not a self-service console where you click to provision a database. If you want Azure SQL Database or Managed Instance with no contract and no OS access, buy it from Microsoft.
A migration to PostgreSQL is a separate AceMQ migration project (assessment, T-SQL conversion, validation and cutover), scoped on its own and not through this service. Once the database is on PostgreSQL we can operate it.
A scratch database with no uptime target needs a current version and a backup, not a managed service. This pays for itself where SQL Server holds revenue or regulated data.
Running several engines? One contract can also cover PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka and more. Managed PostgreSQL services
Escalation Path
Every tier reaches a senior SQL Server engineer. There is no tier-1 triage layer to get through.
P1 escalation path
A replay of one P1, from the first page to the written root-cause analysis
15-minute P1 response, 24/7.
A response time, not a resolution time.
P1 opened, on-call engineer paged
Phone, email or Slack reaches the on-call senior engineer directly, whether the incident is in RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL or Kubernetes. No web form, no tier-1 queue.
Senior engineer on your bridge
A senior engineer who already knows your environment joins a live bridge, so nobody has to re-explain your topology.
Specialists across the stack join
When an incident crosses components, the engineers who know each one join. For RabbitMQ, the path runs to the core team.
Written root-cause analysis
Root cause, the fix applied and the prevention steps, delivered after every P1.
Typical engagements
Cases where SQL Server was part of the estate: change data capture and messaging around SQL Server sources, plus typical-engagement scenarios that describe how an AceMQ SQL Server engagement runs. Scenario cards are marked as service use cases, not past customers.
Utility Holding Company
Reconstructing lineage and documentation for an undocumented estate of legacy Kettle transformations before anyone attempts to change or replace them.
Pentaho
PostgreSQLSQL Server
dbtLogistics and Distribution Company
Ongoing support for a Pentaho Data Integration estate that must keep running reliably while a longer-term replacement is planned.
PentahoSQL ServerPostgreSQL
Docker
Online Travel Platform
Ongoing support for a MySQL change data capture pipeline that needed a full re-snapshot after a planned outage outlasted binlog retention and a trimmed schema history topic.
Debezium
MySQLSQL ServerOracle Database
Kafka
Amazon RDSRegional Logistics Operator
A typical engagement: reviewing an Always On availability group that spans two sites, so the first real failover is not the first test of its replica modes, quorum and lag tracking.
SaaS Platform Team
A typical engagement: AceMQ takes over operations of a SaaS platform's SQL Server estate in the customer's own AWS account, with the data and the licences staying with the customer.
Global Automotive Manufacturer
Replacing fragile SQL-trigger-based ingestion with a reliable event-driven architecture for plant-floor data movement and low-latency operations.
RabbitMQMQTTKafkaSQL Server
KubernetesSupport options
AceMQ offers SQL Server support in four tiers, each handing more of the day-to-day work to AceMQ: 24/7 support and incident response for servers your team runs, proactive reviews of backups, restores, availability groups and patch level, managed SQL Server on your own infrastructure, and fully managed SQL Server on AceMQ infrastructure. Work is delivered with partner SQL Server specialists under one AceMQ SLA. SQL Server 2016 to 2025 is covered, and Microsoft's Extended Security Updates remain Microsoft's.
You run it, we back you up
Best for: Teams that run SQL Server themselves and need senior cover when production misbehaves at 3am.
You run it, we watch it with you
Best for: Teams that want the failed restore or the lagging replica found in a review, not in an outage.
We run it in your cloud or data centre
Best for: Estates that must keep SQL Server inside their own boundary and want someone else to run it.
We host it and run it, as a service
Best for: Teams that want SQL Server without a DBA rota or the infrastructure underneath it.
| Who does what | Tier 1 24/7 support | Tier 2 Proactive monitoring | Tier 3 Managed, your infrastructure | Tier 4 Fully managed by AceMQ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs SQL Server day to day? | Your team | Your team, with AceMQ reviews | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Where does it run? | Your infrastructure | Your infrastructure | Your cloud account or data centre | AceMQ infrastructure |
| 24/7 incident response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response |
| Health checks and CVE alerts | On request | Scheduled | Included | Included |
| Patching and upgrades | Your team, AceMQ advises | Planned with AceMQ | Done by AceMQ | Done by AceMQ |
| Monitoring and on-call | Your team | Your team | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Data, keys and accounts | Yours | Yours | Yours | Your data, hosted by AceMQ |
Every Tier can start as an ad hoc engagement or an annual partnership, and you can move up or down a Tier as your team changes.
One partner for SQL Server
Support is one part of what AceMQ does for SQL Server. The same engineers deliver consulting, health checks, migrations and end-of-life cover, and support the systems that usually run next to it.
FAQ
Answers on SQL Server support from AceMQ: what the 2016 end of extended support means, who provides Extended Security Updates, what is included and who delivers it.
Still have questions about SQL Server? Email an Expert
Managed SQL Server means someone else operates your SQL Server instances: monitoring, patching, backups, failover and on-call. Azure SQL Managed Instance is Microsoft's own platform service, which runs the engine and patching for you inside Azure but gives no operating system access and a narrower feature surface. AceMQ operates standard SQL Server on virtual machines or hardware in your account or data centre (Tier 3), or on infrastructure we run (Tier 4), so you keep the full engine, the version and the exit.
Yes. Tier 3 runs in your AWS or Azure account, on VMware or on bare metal, including air-gapped sites, using your access controls and change process. You keep the account, the data and the licences. Tier 4 is the alternative when you would rather not run any infrastructure, and the licences are either yours or provided by AceMQ, settled in the quote.
Support is an SLA over servers your team runs: you hold the pager and call us when something breaks, and we review and advise. Managed services means we run them: monitoring, failover, backups, patching and on-call are ours. Teams with a capable DBA usually want support (Tiers 1 and 2). Teams that want SQL Server to stop being their problem want managed services (Tiers 3 and 4).
At Tiers 3 and 4, AceMQ. Cumulative and security updates are applied on an agreed cadence after testing on a non-production copy. Backups run against your recovery objectives and are restored into a scratch environment on a schedule. Availability group modes, quorum and lag are monitored, and failover is rehearsed before it is needed.
We can operate them, but we cannot patch them: SQL Server is Microsoft's, and SQL Server 2016 extended support ended on 14 July 2026. The security route is Microsoft's Extended Security Updates through Azure Arc or the SQL IaaS Agent extension, which we enrol and install, or an upgrade, which we plan and run as a project in the service.
Yes. AceMQ works on SQL Server in two ways: ad hoc engagements for a defined piece of work, such as a health check, an upgrade or an incident, or an annual contract that covers 24/7 support and proactive reviews. Many teams start ad hoc and move to an annual contract once the first engagement is done.
Managed SQL Server is quoted per scope, with no list price: the price depends on the number of environments and nodes, the SLA, whether AceMQ runs SQL Server on your infrastructure (Tier 3) or on ours (Tier 4), and the access and change process you need. Request a quote and AceMQ replies within 1 hour.
Let's talk
Reactive cover, proactive reviews, or AceMQ running SQL Server for you on your infrastructure or ours. A senior engineer scopes it with you, and quote requests are answered within 1 hour.
Production incident right now?Email a SQL Server Architect
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