I worked as a Remote DBA for 3 years , to an international company . I was employed to supplement an existing Developer\DBA – in more advanced tasks. For example, performance tuning , occasional capacity planning , advice on failover – and troubleshooting issues

 The interesting aspects of this contract were:

1)I met the employer once only– and fulfilled the remainder of the contract remotely

2)I was paid on a fixed day retainer. So, regardless of the time used – I was paid a fixed retainer. In general – the time spent evened out.

3)The main contact changed twice in the period of my involvement

4)The company was bought out twice in the same period. The second time , the purchasing company had a large IT team who absorbed this work

5)There was an agreement – that I would respond at least within 6 hrs of a call – within business hours

I now work as a consultant within \  large companies – where there is increasing pressure from management to adopt offshore resource- due to persuasive financial cost benefits.

The trend amongst those companies – is to Remote out middleware,web layer support but maintain DBA services in-house. This is predominantly because data is sensitive.

 I’d be interested to hear similar experiences from individuals who’ve been Remote DBAs – and how they perceive the future of outsourced DBA work

Source:Jack Vamvas (http://www.sqlserver-dba.com)