Databases

The most used term for someone who is not a Database Administrator (DBA) but is tasked with looking after one or more database servers is “accidental DBA.” It can be a hard and thankless task, which is sometimes assigned to someone who has little to no experience managing a database server. This is in addition…

Many purchases you make during your life are emotional choices—buying a house or a car are near the top of that list for most people. Yes, you often still set a budget for these purchases, but you are more likely to break it based on an emotional connection. To see how emotions play into other…

There are a large number of best practices around SQL Server performance tuning – I could easily write a whole book on the topic, especially when you consider the number of different database settings, SQL Server settings, coding practices, SQL wait types, and so on that can affect performance. For this post I decided to…

People are often curious how presenters and bloggers come up with topics for their content. For this particular blog post, I looked at my smart watch. My watch suggests that I take 10,000 steps a day, which got me thinking about the steps required to optimize database application performance. When it comes to some of…

The goal of SQL Server optimization is to enhance the performance, efficiency, and reliability of database operations. Thereby ensuring applications operate seamlessly, and users enjoy consistent, responsive experiences. SQL Server optimization involves fine-tuning both the SQL query performance and the database to enable more efficient data retrieval and manipulation. This process requires a deep understanding…

MySQL or PostgreSQL: Which one do you choose? While the lines between these two popular systems are heavily blurred, there are a few distinct features that make one option more ideal than the other in particular situations. When deciding between MySQL and PostgreSQL, consider factors such as data integrity, performance, extensibility, open-source vs. commercial support,…

Test Driven Development (TDD) is not only a discipline we like to write about, we practice it ourselves every day. This is a blog post we shared with our friends over at Rainforest QA. Because we know you can’t enough of a good thing, we’re re-posting it here. Enjoy! Librato is a prolific engineering shop….

Since the release of SQL Server® 2017 on Linux®, DBAs have been waiting for a native release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) on Linux. At this point, Microsoft has stated that they have no plans for a native Linux version of SSMS. However, they have just released a preview version of SQL Operations Studio,…

Database replication is an essential aspect of modern business that helps ensure data availability, consistency, and protection. As databases continue to grow and become more complex, it’s crucial to have an efficient way of managing and monitoring your replication software. In this post, we’ll dive into what database replication software is and why it’s vital…

DataOps is a methodology and set of practices to improve quality and speed of delivery for data and data analytics. It incorporates agile development methodologies, as well as approaches from DevOps to improve the lifecycle of data initiatives, from preparation through making it available to end users for reporting and analysis. As organizations try to adopt…

I have a confession to make. I love Power BI, but I don’t always do nice things to external APIs when I use it. A good example is when I need a quick set of data visuals from Salesforce. It is so easy just to pop open the “Get Data” dialog, pull in entire objects,…

These days, even business-critical applications are being virtualized, and with the increasing costs and complexity of data environments, it’s not surprising. Some estimate that large organizations are as much as 70% virtualized already, with no plans to go back to physical servers. Virtualization, however, introduces new challenges for the Oracle DBA, including getting visibility to…

MySQL is a popular open-source relational database management system and knowing how to optimize it is essential. Slow database performance can severely affect all your applications and users; a single poorly designed SQL query can have a big impact. Optimizing your MySQL database isn’t a simple process, but it’s vital for maintaining application performance and…

If your DBMS can’t keep up with end-user requests or critical application needs, you’ll lose out on key opportunities to turn actionable data into hard-and-fast results. Today, enterprises rise and fall based on the quality of their data, the ways they store it, and the speed with which they turn it into action. You need…

Let’s forget about performance for a moment, or even user-facing processes at all. A lot of tasks are admin-related and require at least the concept of looping, if not an explicit loop or cursor (or multiple). Think about how you would do these things in T-SQL otherwise:  The search ultimately needs to check every string column in…

Recently I have spoken with a number of people about the key things that they monitor when it comes to SQL Server, with the key metrics CPU, Memory, and I/O mentioned. Some others set up alerts for specific errors or severity of errors, however one thing that comes up very rarely is monitoring for Suspect…

In a recent blog post entitled Is Logical Data Modeling Dead?, Karen Lopez (b | t) comments on the trends in the data modeling discipline and shares her own processes and preferences for logical data modeling (LDM). Her key point is that LDMs are on the decline primarily because they (and their creators) have failed to adapt to changing development…

Home Is Where the Heart (and Compute) Is Selecting the proper Azure virtual machine (VM) size is not unlike trying to find the right fit for your family when purchasing a house or finding an apartment. If you have a family of six, with four kids, that one-bedroom condo near the city center might be conveniently located…

The performance of your applications is a complex, multi-layered puzzle. Performance can be negatively impacted at the application layer or even by remote calls to networked services. However, the most common bottleneck for applications is the data storage layer. The most common data storage tier for applications is a relational database, whose performance can vary…

One of the easiest ways to increase query performance in SQL Server is to make sure it can quickly access the requested data as efficiently as possible. In SQL Server, using one or more indexes can be exactly the fix you need. In fact, indexes are so important, SQL Server can warn you when it…

Sybase, the high-performing, enterprise-level Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) by Sybase Inc., is known for its efficiency, robustness, and scalability. This all-star database system is instrumental in managing large amounts of data while delivering high availability and security. But why is monitoring Sybase crucial? What are the best tools to get this done? Let’s jump…