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Support

General Support Questions

I called the 800 number, you didn't call back?

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 a 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 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

A lot of companies offer phone support for products, why don't you?

Complimentary support is often provided for end user application products, but rarely for database software. Command Prompt does not bundle the price of support into the products. Command Prompt'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, Command Prompt allows customers to choose their own method of support.

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

Do I need an expensive support package or consulting package for phone support?

No.

Customers seeking support who do not have a contract can purchase a single Incident with Command Prompt. Please visit http://www.commandprompt.com/support/

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

What defines an Incident?

An Incident is defined as assistance with one issue, problem, or question relating to the use or installation of a PostgreSQL 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. Thus you will only pay for a single incident at any given time.

What if the support engineer doesn't resolve my problem? Am I still charged for the support?

Command Prompt 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.

What is the difference between Support and Consulting?

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

Example 1:

Customer: My PostgreSQL database won't start 

Command Prompt: What is the error you are recieving? 

Customer: Something about not having enough shared memory. 

Command Prompt: 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? 

Command Prompt: 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.

Command Prompt: Great, what can we do to help? 

Customer: I am trying to remember the exact syntax for creating a type.
Command Prompt: 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.
Command Prompt: 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?
Command Prompt: Sure.

Example 4 would be consulting.