General Support Questions

Our call staff will specifically ask you if you accept the emergency rates as found on our support pages. If you do not accept our emergency rates, our call staff will not contact an on-call engineer but will log a ticket within our support system.

Accepting our emergency rates does not mean you will be billed. It does mean that we reserve the right to determine if your call is billable. You must accept our emergency rates to receive an after-hours call back.

Incidents

Complimentary support is often provided for end-user application products, but rarely for database software. Smedia does not bundle the price of support into the products. Smedia's customers vary greatly in their ability to support their own database infrastructure. Rather than charge all customers for support by increasing the product price, Smedia allows customers to choose their own method of support.

Those looking for complimentary PostgreSQL support are encouraged to seek the very helpful PostgreSQL community located at: http://www.postgresql.org

No.

Customers seeking support who do not have a contract can purchase a single incident with Smedia. Please visit Smedia Support for more information.

Customers seeking ad-hoc consulting may pay our standard hourly rates in 15 minute increments.

An incident is defined as assistance with one issue, problem, or question relating to the use or installation of a product or product component, regardless of the number of communications required. A single support incident is a problem that cannot be broken down into subordinate problems. If a problem consists of subordinate problems, each is considered a separate incident.

If a single incident involves subordinate problems, the subordinate problems are billed as time and materials consulting and you will only pay for a single incident at any given time.

Smedia considers access to an engineer an incident or support request. If you spent time working with a support engineer, it will be considered an incident or support request.

It is difficult to define the difference but below are some example scenarios:

Example 1:

Customer: My PostgreSQL database won't start 

Smedia: What is the error you are recieving? 

Customer: Something about not having enough shared memory. 

Smedia: You probably need to increase the shared memory available to PostgreSQL, 
you can do this by increasing the kernel.shmmax parameter in /etc/sysctl.conf. 

Customer: Can you log into our machine and take care of this for us? 

Smedia: Yes but it will be considered consulting. 

At this point, the customer would be responsible for the cost of the incident plus the time and materials consulting associated with performing the external work to the incident.

Example 2:

Customer: I am trying to code a SET OF function to return a SET based on computed values.

Smedia: Great, what can we do to help? 

Customer: I am trying to remember the exact syntax for creating a type.
Smedia: No problem, please refer to Set Returning Function at this website.

Customer: Oh I see, I just forgot to be explicit. 

Example 2 would be a single incident.

Example 3:

Customer: I am getting a syntax error on line 32 of the function that I have
attached to this email.
Smedia: You are missing a semi-colon and need to predefine the variable.

Example 3 would be a single incident.

Example 4:

Customer: Can you write me a function that computes the value of X?
Smedia: Sure.

Example 4 would be consulting.