Service 04
Schema review & normalization
A senior pair-of-eyes on your schema — flagging accidental N+1 designs, denormalisation that hurt you, and modelling that won't scale.
At a glance
- Output
- Schema diff + ADR document
- Duration
- 3–5 business days
- Starts at
- $98.00
Most schemas are an archaeology dig — early decisions, panic-driven denormalisation, and fields that "we'll clean up later". The cost shows up as expensive joins, fragile migrations, and a team that's afraid to touch the model.
We map the entities you have versus the ones you should have, given your actual access patterns and growth curve. The deliverable is a written ADR (architecture decision record) you can take to your team — not a 60-page audit nobody reads.
Everything in scope, named.
Concrete deliverables — no vague promises about "best practices".
Entity-relationship review with growth assumptions
Hot-table normalization / partitioning recommendations
Foreign key + constraint hygiene check
Migration plan to reach the recommended end state
A clear runbook, not a black box.
-
01
Map
ER diagram of the current schema, with hot tables, dead columns, and accidental denormalisation flagged.
-
02
Profile
Access pattern analysis — which queries touch which tables, what they project, what they filter on.
-
03
Recommend
Normalisation moves, partitioning candidates, FK hygiene fixes — each with a stated cost and benefit.
-
04
Plan
A migration plan to get from current → recommended, in incremental safe steps.
Battle-tested, not shiny.
The tools we trust on real production workloads — that's what we'll be using on yours.
Best for
- ✓ Models that grew organically and now hurt to query
- ✓ Pre-scaling reviews before a 10× traffic event
- ✓ Teams considering moving to event-sourcing or CQRS
Not the right fit when
- ✕ Greenfield design from a blank page — we focus on existing systems
Pick a plan that includes this service.
All plans ship with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Often paired with
Service 01
Performance audit
A focused read of your slow-query log, EXPLAIN plans, and missing indexes — turned into a punch list of the highest-impact fixes.
Read more
Service 02
Index & query optimization
We rebuild your index strategy on a staging copy, rewrite the worst offenders, and verify with before/after benchmarks.
Read more
Service 03
Database migration
Single-engine upgrades or full cross-engine migrations using pgloader, AWS DMS, or custom ETL pipelines — with a verified cutover.
Read moreReady to start your schema review & normalization?
Pick a plan that fits, or send us a paragraph about what's slow — we'll come back within an hour.