Tech’s Most Wanted: A Profile of the Cybersecurity Professional

The scarcity of qualified talent in the IT sector is especially pronounced…

Latest Posts

A Look into the Pi-Shaped Expert Model

So you’ve started planning your career using a VCDX skillset. Continuing on that same train of thought, I want to walk you through an additional concept that might help you…

Mastering the Sort Buffer and sort_buffer_size

The sort buffer, which is controlled by the sort_buffer_size setting, is probably one of the most-discussed MySQL settings. Interestingly, in many cases it has a lot less potential to help…

Are You Getting Full Benefit of your IT Monitoring Tools?

I think we’ve all had that moment at 3:00 a.m. over the weekend when we wish our monitoring and management systems would just shut up. The UPS in rack 4’s…

Troubleshooting SQL Server, Part 1 : Do You Use These Shortcuts?

In the popular white paper entitled Troubleshooting SQL Server Wait Statistics, I take you through three scenarios in which a wait stats-only approach is insufficient or even harmful to detecting, diagnosing,…

Using VSAN to Maximize Database Performance

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to speak at VMWorld in San Francisco. The session title was Using Virtual SAN to Maximize Database Performance, and in that session I…

Selecting Queries for Optimization

Query optimization can feel like an overwhelming task. Where to start? In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to select which queries you really should optimize. This is a step…

Learning to Pivot

The role of information technology inside of corporations is not new; it has existed for decades. With each passing year we see acceleration in the speed and complexity of changes…

Brainiac Corner with Ryn Daniels

Ryn Daniels is an operations engineer at Etsy who got her start in programming with TI-80 calculators back when Geocities was still cool, and these days has opinions on things like…

Playing Operation with Systems

We live in a hectic world of day-to-day operations and aggressive business requirements that must be facilitated and made possible by IT — often in a vacuum. And we do…

Four Ways Your Network Could Change in Four Years

While network administrators are used to keeping the lights on, the time is approaching for a major change in the way networks look and run. While SDN is still in…