Insights and Best Practices

Latest Posts in Insights and Best Practices

How Do MySQL Indexes Work? An In-Depth Tutorial on Creating Clustered and Secondary Indexes and The Effect on Database Performance

MySQL is the most used database in the world. And as it continues to grow in popularity as an open-source database system for developers, understanding how these indexes work is…

Comprehensive Guide on Partitioning and Sharding in Azure Database for PostgreSQL

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve had to repeatedly help companies fix has been poor partitioning design. I’ve seen many database architectures designed in an attempt to make queries faster.…

The Challenges of Multi-Cloud Management and How Observability Helps Solve Them

When I started my career in information technology, I worked for a large insurance company in Omaha, Nebraska. At the time, they exclusively used Lotus Notes, an IBM product. Even…

Why You Need to Automate DevOps

When I began my career in IT more than two decades ago, most organizations had multiple silos of application development teams. Each team would be responsible for a single application…

IT Trends Report Shows Experience Equals Confidence When Managing Complex IT Environments

Each year, SolarWinds publishes the IT Trends report, a collection of responses to survey questions meant to gain insight into the world of IT. I enjoy the IT Trends report…

What is a Data Warehouse? Benefits and Tips

A data warehouse (DW) is a centralized repository of data integrated from multiple systems.. This data is often cleansed and standardized before being loaded. Designed to support analytical workloads, a…

Comparing PostgreSQL and MySQL Databases: Differences Explained

Over the past two to three years, I’ve seen customers make a move towards both MySQL and PostgreSQL. There is no software licensing with either of these database systems, which…

How DBAs are Using SolarWinds DPM and Marginalia to reduce MTTR

Database performance is critical to business revenue. Slow and non-responsive databases can result in hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in lost revenue from poor customer experience and downtime.…

Three Ways Educational Institutions Can Better Plan for Continuous Learning

If we’ve learned anything from the past few years, it’s the routines we used to consider normal—like being able to walk onto a college campus and attend class in-person each…

Three Ways to Prepare Your Agency for a Modernized Digital Verification System

Last year, the U.S. House of Representatives introduced legislation for states to develop highly secure, interoperable systems enabling digital identity verification. According to the Better Identity Coalition, the Improving Digital…