Databases

If you are utilizing a SQL Server, monitoring needs to be an essential part of your database management process. Without keeping a close eye on your Microsoft SQL Server performance, you run the risk of increased performance-related outages and incidents along with potential higher costs. With effective monitoring, you can reduce risk and take the…

When it comes to choosing the right database management system (DBMS) for your enterprise needs, PostgreSQL—also known as Postgres—and EnterpriseDB (EDB) Postgres Advanced Server often top the list of contenders. While Postgres is a widely adopted open-source database known for its stability and feature-rich capabilities, EDB builds on this with additional tools and enterprise-focused features….

Your database is one of the most crucial components of your application. When your application grows in scale and complexity, it becomes essential to ensure your database performs optimally. You can speed up the rendering of your web pages or refactor your APIs for a faster response, but any performance bottlenecks in your database will…

A Database Administrator (DBA) is like a racecar technician. Building and optimizing a high-performance vehicle requires minuscule fine-tuning and attention to detail. A tweak here and an adjustment there could shave just a fraction of a second from your lap time. Of course, that fraction of a second could determine whether you win or lose…

Managing any database ecosystem is difficult enough: taking backups, maintaining statistics, and doing performance tuning all tax the time of the DBA or database developer. The job is complex even without considering the work you do to manage the various schema and data drifts that can occur. Unless you operate in a vacuum or within…

In this post I am going to discuss a couple of key points for a DBA to consider when thinking about storage needs for their SQL Servers. I’ll also show you some SolarWinds SQL Sentry features that will keep you on top of this information to help you make informed decisions—and even see into the future! What’s…

Query tuning is often the fastest way to accelerate SQL Server performance. Most often system-level server performance (memory, processors, and so on) improvement measures are ineffective and expensive. Expert developers believe most performance issues can be traced to poorly written queries & inefficient indexing, not hardware constraints. In fact, some performance issues can only be…

Issues and delays caused by database performance networks are a time and money drain IT teams can’t afford. With so many performance risk factors at play (memory usage, indexing, etc.), it can be hard to determine where, when, and why a problem is occurring. Implementing SQL tools focused on performance, monitoring, and management is a…

Storage is one of the most critical components for any relational database management system, and getting the right storage configuration affects reliability, availability, and performance. When it comes to SQL Server storage best practices, choosing between storage hardware options has changed significantly over the last decade, but that doesn’t necessarily make choosing the correct storage…

One of the most fundamental concepts in any relational database management system (RDBMS), such as SQL Server, is the transaction. During my consulting career, I’ve seen many performance problems caused by developers not understanding how transactions work in SQL Server. In this tutorial, I’ll explain what transactions are, why they’re necessary, and how they work…

Naming conventions are a very subjective thing, of course. Just like coding styles, they can often lead to anything from minor debates to full-blown religious arguments. Upper case vs. lower case keywords, tabs vs. spaces, and where to put commas come to mind. Heck, these same people even get into sub-arguments about whether the terms “upper…

Continuous learning is essential to keeping up with new and changing technologies that will impact all businesses and data professionals’ jobs in the coming years. During our free webinar, The Top 4 Data Technology Trends Every DBA Should Know About in 2019, I was part of a panel of data technology experts, including dbatools.io Creator Chrissy…

SQL Server DBAs—even those who have years of experience with relational databases—frequently make the same mistakes repeatedly. Wouldn’t you like to learn about those blunders so that you can sidestep them? Well, I have good news! In a recent webinar, I counted down the 10 most common SQL Server mistakes DBAs make. Read below as I recap…

What Prompted This Post? As lots of you know already, Kevin Kline has joined us here at SQL Sentry. I’ve followed Kevin myself for a good while, so I’m really excited to have him here with us. One of the first things Kevin asked of me was to list the top 5 technical issues we…

Description from The SentryOne community One of the things we’ve come to understand in our dealings with the Windows operating system as it relates to performance monitoring is that the performance counter system is very fragile. It doesn’t take much at all to set it off kilter and most of the time you won’t even…

Many organizations have migrated their environments from on-premises to the cloud, and one of the clouds of choice is Microsoft Azure. For SQL Server workloads, organizations can use platform as a service solutions with features like Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance or infrastructure as a service solutions with Azure SQL virtual machines. Azure SQL virtual…

One of the easier ways to improve the performance of your SQL Server and Azure SQL database queries is to ensure you choose the right data types for your data, and the data types in your application’s code match the ones in your stored procedures and queries. Choosing the right data type conserves space, because…

You probably know someone with trust issues, but do you know if your database has trust issues? In other words, does your database have Check Constraints and Foreign Keys that are not trusted? If so, it’s important to realize that SQL Server may not be able to use them for query plans and optimization, which…

A database management system, also called DBMS, is a program that allows admins to access, alter, and analyze a database. In this article, I’ll describe the functions of a database management system and review different types of databases. While this isn’t a comprehensive list of all DBMS types, it’s a start if you’re looking for…

During our recent SentryOne Accelerate 2020 virtual conference, I led a cloud migration panel discussion with several SQL Server experts. I asked the panelists to imagine they were riding in an elevator and someone turned to them and said, “You are really good at managing SQL Server. What tips do you have for someone like…

For many organizations who traditionally had to adopt expensive and usually relatively inflexible on-site database solutions, the increasing adoption of database-as-a-service (DBaaS) providers is a welcome alternative, as DBaaS offers a flexible, cloud-based database option through subscription services. Among DBaaS platforms, Microsoft Azure® SQL Database has become a go-to option for organizations hoping to move…