Database

Monitoring has always been a loosely defined and somewhat controversial term in IT organizations. IT professionals have very strong opinions about the tools they use, because monitoring performance metrics and…

Logwatch is essentially a system log analyzer and reporter. It elaborates logs that are simply collected by syslog. This kind of evolution is simplifying the daily job of modern system…

I often see forum posts from accidental administrators who want to know how to recover data without a backup. The short answer is, “Now is a good time to work…

Over the years, I’ve read more than a few articles about the qualities that are found in the best administrators. These articles focus on soft skills, but sometimes will list…

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…

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 working…

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 been unable to…

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…

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…

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 globally, not locally. If…