Database

Big-O Notation Made Simple

10/23/13 If you’re a programmer or computer scientist, you’re probably familiar with Big-O notation. It’s part of your foundational understanding of how complex a problem and/or al…

Improve SQL Server Performance by Looking at Plan Cache (Part 3)

10/03/13 You can use the information in the SQL Server plan cache to research performance issues and investigate opportunities for performance improvement. In this three-part artic…

Improve SQL Server Performance by Looking at Plan Cache (Part 2)

10/03/13 In this second part of a three-part article series, we’ll look at how to examine the plan cache to quickly identify plans that need tuning, including: Plans that have miss…

Improve SQL Server Performance by Looking at Plan Cache (Part 1)

10/03/13 The plan cache holds a great deal of information about the overall health of your database instance. You can use the plan cache to investigate current performance issues a…

100% Reproducible Builds in Go

09/10/13 This post was featured in our July 2015 anthology of most popular SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor (DPM) blog posts of all time. One of the nice things about Go is …

Godaemon, a Library to Daemonize Go Apps

08/27/13 At SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor we have a specific need to daemonize one of our Go applications, which must safely run detached from terminals, with a working …

A tutorial on how to use Go’s database/sql package

07/22/13 We found ourselves wishing for a tutorial to complement the database/sql documentation in Go, so we wrote one and shared it on Github. Please send pull requests to contrib…

Streaming Approximate Histograms in Go

07/08/13 If you’re looking at response time, what’s more useful: a mean or a percentile? Not sure? You probably know how to calculate the average or mean of a sample, but what abou…

4 Statistical Process Control Rules That Detect Anomalies in Systems

06/26/13 Statistical Process Control (SPC), or using numbers or data to study the characteristics of our process to make it behave the way we want it to behave, has been around sin…

Quantifying Abnormal Behavior

06/25/13 At Velocity last week, I spoke about how we quantify abnormality in a system’s time-series metrics cheaply, in realtime, at high frequency. Note that this is not the same …

Replacing Clever Code with Unremarkable Code in Go

06/04/13 Not too long ago, my primary programming language was Perl. I’ve written a lot of Perl, including some things that I think are quite clever. And therein lies the problem. …

How Does Adaptive Fault Detection Work? Does It Eliminate Thresholds?

04/17/13 In previous posts, I claimed that thresholds are a root of much evil in monitoring systems (not the root of all evil, but a root of much evil), and that we’ve developed th…