Database

How DevOps Changes Monitoring

06/13/18 One of the most interesting changes that I have observed in my career is Microsoft shifting from just being a development organization to truly becoming a DevOps team, in …

The Future Isn’t in Databases, But in the Data

06/11/18 In the past year I have earned a couple of certificates from the Microsoft Professional Program. One certificate was in Data Science, the other in Big Data. I’m currently …

Monitor Critical Databases Confidently with the Sensitive Data Vault

06/01/18 Building extremely deep monitoring as a SaaS product has a drawback: we capture too much data for some customers’ compliance requirements. As a result, some companies have…

New Stats Exposed in Go’s database/SQL Package

05/22/18 If you keep up with the Go development cycle, then you’ll know Go recently entered its feature-freeze for the Go 1.11 release. One of the changes for this upcoming release…

The High Cost and Low Benefit of Unused Index Advice

04/26/18 You have to be careful what you wish for. The signal:noise ratio of finding out which indexes are “unused” is low. This isn’t obvious at first glance, but upon deeper insp…

How to Select the Right Queries to Optimize

04/18/18 Why is selecting the right queries to optimize so important? There are several reasons. Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish Look at the forest, not just the trees, and optimize glob…

Cognitive Bias in IT Decision Making

03/29/18 Logic and objective thinking are hallmarks of any engineering field. IT design and troubleshooting are no exceptions. Computers and networks are systems of logic so we, as…

The Impact Of Coupling On System Design

03/16/18 In system design, every technical decision can be seen as a series of trade-offs. If I choose to implement Technology A it will provide a positive outcome in one way, but …

Assessing Database Health and Performance

03/13/18 Here is an interesting article from my colleague Joe Kim, in which he explores database health and performance. Part of the problem with managing databases is that many pe…

Numeric Optimization in Golang With Nelder-Mead and Gonum

03/12/18 Numeric optimization is a set of techniques for fitting a function to a dataset by iteratively refining estimates. Numeric optimization is one way to do things like curve-…

Disaster Recovery – Time To Create Our Plan!

03/06/18 Thus far, we have gone over how to classify our disasters and how to have some of those difficult conversations with our organization regarding Disaster Recovery (DR). We’…

Announcement: p99 Percentile Metrics

03/01/18 I’m pleased to announce that SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM) offers 99th percentile metrics to help understand latency outliers in a query workload. These m…