Peter Marquie · Founder

Senior database experience, applied directly.

I founded Marquie Data Systems after 25 years operating production data platforms for investment banks, national technology companies, and logistics businesses. Clients work with me directly—from diagnosis and design through implementation and handoff.

Start with the system you already have.

Many database problems do not require a new platform. They usually show up as:

• Systems getting slower as data grows
• Unexpected downtime or fragile failover
• Cloud or licensing costs creeping up
• Data pipelines that can't quite be trusted

The first step is to measure the workload, test recovery, and map the dependencies. Replacement becomes an option only when the evidence shows that repair or modernization in place is not enough.

Relevant experience

I am a United States Air Force veteran and have worked in SOC 2, PCI DSS, and SOX-audited environments where performance and recovery had to be demonstrated, not assumed.

Notable engagements (anonymized):

• Global investment bank. Migrated 4,000+ SQL Servers across U.S. data centers, built 5,000+ clusters, tuned tables above three billion rows, and delivered sub-3 ms commit times for a trading platform.
• National booking-and-scheduling SaaS. Led a zero-downtime cutover from managed hosting to AWS and Azure with 100% SLA compliance during the migration window.
• Industrial logistics provider. Designed four Always On Availability Group farms with automatic failover and built a real-time replication path from UNIX sources into the OLTP platform.
• National parenting-media platform. Right-sized non-production SQL Server licensing for $1.2M in annual savings and led a distributed DBA team across SQL Server, MySQL, Couchbase, and Hadoop.
• National restaurant-ordering platform. Moved Snowflake configuration into Terraform, reduced AWS hosting costs by 20%, raised PostgreSQL-to-Snowflake pipeline accuracy to 99.9%, and led a Fivetran billing audit that recovered overpayments.

Figures above are from twenty-five years of employed and contracted DBA roles, stated from direct experience. Engagement details and references are available in scoping conversations.

How engagements run

I enter the existing environment, establish a baseline, identify the highest-risk or highest-cost failure, and fix it with an agreed test and rollback plan. Monitoring or automation is added only when someone can own it after handoff.

Most firms make money when you change platforms. I focus on getting your current systems to perform the way they should have in the first place.

A 30-minute scoping call is usually enough to determine whether the problem fits and what evidence is needed next.

Who we work with

There are two types of organizations this work is built for.

Local businesses

Operators who rely on their systems but don't have time to manage them — businesses where:

• reports are slow or inconsistent
• data lives in multiple systems that don't quite line up
• backups exist, but no one's verified them
• issues get worked around instead of fixed

Too complex to ignore. Not large enough to justify full-time database staff.

Fit: when the business depends on its data, but no one owns it end-to-end.

Mid-market operators

Teams already running real systems — with real consequences. Organizations using SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redshift, or Snowflake — on cloud or on-prem — where:

• performance impacts customers or revenue
• downtime isn't acceptable
• data pipelines need to be trusted, not questioned
• costs are rising without clear cause

These aren't early-stage problems. They're operational ones.

Fit: when the systems are in production — and the stakes are real.

What clients can expect

• Local when it matters. Based in Ossining and available on-site in Westchester when the work requires it. Remote engagements are handled directly, not outsourced.
• Plain English, no translation required. Problems, tradeoffs, and recommendations are written for the people responsible for the business decision, not only the engineering team.
• Fixed-price first step. The initial engagement has a written price, scope, deliverables, and acceptance criteria before work begins.
• Measured, not assumed. Changes are compared against a real workload or an explicit recovery test. Improvement has to be visible in the evidence.
• Built for audited environments. Access, change control, validation, and recovery evidence are designed to stand up in SOC 2, PCI DSS, and SOX-audited environments.

This is a fit for organizations that already have systems in place — and need them to work better. It is not a fit for generic greenfield application development, tool shopping, or speculative redesigns.

Service area

Ossining, NY and the surrounding Westchester / lower Hudson Valley towns: Briarcliff Manor, Croton-on-Hudson, Sleepy Hollow, Tarrytown, Pleasantville, Chappaqua, Millwood, Yorktown Heights. Remote engagements welcome anywhere in the U.S.