The 4 Pillars of Effective Database Observability

SolarWinds just dropped a whitepaper, From Monitoring to Mastery: Optimizing Database Performance…

Latest Posts

The Challenges of Network Virtualization Technologies

Network virtualization, software defined network (SDN), and network function virtualization (NFV) have taken the communication industry by storm. They are no longer buzzwords; the industry is seriously focusing and converging…

How to Prevent a Data Breach from SQL Injection Attacks

The average total cost of a data breach right now is $3.79 million, according to the 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Analysis. Cyber attacks are one of the top…

Looking Backward to Look Forward

“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past” -unspecified “wise men” quoted by Niccolò Machiavelli With so many articles out there telling me how SDN will change the…

How to Explain Virtualization to Newbies

In the world of enterprise architecture, many parts of our daily conversations are taken for granted. We talk about virtualization, vMotion®, Storage vMotion, Replication, IOPS, and so very many other…

What If You Can’t Trace End-to-End?

A lot of monitoring systems have a goal of end-to-end tracing, from “click to disk” or something similar. This is usually implemented by adding some kind of tracing information to…

Monitoring: How and Why We Do It

Monitoring is a lot of work. A monitoring system is a service unto itself, and like other applications it needs care, feeding, configuration, databases, DBAs, patching, and maintenance. Though it…

Queueing Theory: Faster Trains Might Make London Underground Slower

Let’s take a look at a great real-world example that effectively illustrates how queuing theory can be unintuitive even in situations that seem simple. A recent BBC report reveals researchers’…

The Premise of Premises: All Clouds Are Not Created Equal

There’s a common misconception in the IT industry. This misconception stems from the premise that the premises of your infrastructure will either be more expensive or less expensive based on its…

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…