@carnival-boy said in MSP or VAR or just avoid:

For an MSP to be truly agnostic it would either have to massive (to be able to employ both Oracle and SQL Server experts), or it is full of generalists who can support both but lack expertise in either.

That's part of the goal, or typical goals, of moving to the MSP model. They bring more scale and with scale comes agnosticism (the move towards it, but obtaining it as you pointed out.) You might not have expertise or experience with every OS out there, but even a moderately small MSP like NTG regularly supports and works with many databases. Not Oracle, which isn't a big deal as it has essentially no place in any intentional deployment, but MS SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, REDIS, MongoDB, SQLite, etc. all regularly supported.

MSPs are way more likely to have the desire and ability to grow support skill sets, although this can happen internally as well. But internal skill growth is costly and risky to maintain. For an MSP, skill growth increases potential customer support options. So MSPs have more incentive to consider things they've not done specifically before than internal IT departments do.

Nothing is perfect, but MSPs make agnosticism easier and more likely.