Database

Using Socat to Simulate Networking Traffic to Test and Debug

04/15/13 If you don’t know socat, you probably should. From its man: Socat is a command line based utility that establishes two bidirectional byte streams and transfers data betwee…

Two Reasons Why Threshold-Based Monitoring Is Hopelessly Broken

04/10/13 Why is a threshold-based alert such a disaster? There are two big reasons. Thresholds are always wrong. They’re worse than a broken clock, which is at least right twice a …

A Sure-Fire Recipe For Monitoring Disaster

04/09/13 In this post I’ll tell a story that will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever monitored MySQL. Here’s a recipe for a threshold-based alert that will go horribly wrong, beyon…

Why You Should Almost Never Alert On Thresholds

04/08/13 This post is part of an ongoing series on the best practices for effective and insightful database monitoring. Much of what’s covered in these posts is unintuitive, yet vi…

SQL Server Consolidation, Part 3

12/20/12 I wrote a couple of posts previously on SQL Server consolidation. The first post tried to give insight on some of the problems and associated motivating factors that most …

SQL Server Consolidation, Part 2

12/20/12 Consider for a moment that you have a deck attached to your house. It is one story above ground level and is growing weaker with each passing year. The former homeowner pa…

SQL Server Consolidation, Part 1

12/20/12 I am seeing more than a handful of articles these days regarding SQL Server virtualization and/or consolidation. Lots of companies are coming forward to provide you tools …

Performance Counters for Database Mirroring

12/19/12 We have customers using database mirroring, so I wanted to take some time to write a quick post regarding database mirroring and performance monitoring. Microsoft has publ…

Performance Tuning and Time Invested

12/17/12 I never cared for the phrase “wasted time” when it comes to something like performance tuning. Sure, we all feel that way, especially when we spend hours on something only…

Have You Made These 5 Database Design Mistakes?

11/15/12 Look, everyone makes mistakes. It’s true. But not all of us have the chance to make mistakes that end up costing millions of dollars in hardware and production support cos…

SQL Server CXPacket Wait Type

11/13/12 When are CXPACKET waits a problem? Note: This article, by Thomas LaRock, was posted 8/19/2013 and supercedes the previous version. This update has been made in response to…

SQL Server fn_dblog() Function Details and Example

11/12/12 The fndblog() function (formerly known as the DBCC command) is one of several undocumented functions for SQL Server. It allows you to view the transaction log records in t…