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

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

Latest Posts

Consul for Cluster Health Monitoring

If you’re not familiar with Consul, it’s what I call a cluster management tool. It’s composed of a handful of features such as “Service Discovery,” “Key Value Store,” “DNS Server,”…

DBA Personalities: DISC and Values Models

What personality characteristics do great DBAs share? What motivates them? If you’re not sure why you should care, you’re probably not a hiring manager! Hiring and retaining highly skilled people…

Announcing New Free Network Analyzer Tools for MySQL and PostgreSQL

We have released two free tools that will help MySQL and PostgreSQL DBAs understand the queries their database servers execute. As you probably know, we have spent nearly 3 years…

Five Steps to Great Trade Show Demos

Spring is approaching, and with it, the season of sponsorships. For vendors, trade shows offer a unique opportunity to gain valuable insight regarding market needs, engage potential customers, and show…

Temp Tables, Filesorts, UTF8, VARCHAR, and Schema Design in MySQL

The other day we were doing some peer review on a schema change at SolarWinds and the topic of character set, column length, and the potential downsides of using utf8 came…

See Connection Latency with SolarWinds

Recently, one of our customers reached out to us about a problem they were having trouble diagnosing – they noticed that every once in a while, it took their MySQL…

Schemaless Databases Don’t Exist

There’s no such thing as a schemaless database. I know, lots of people want a schemaless database, and lots of companies are promoting their products as schemaless DBMSs. And schemaless…

What Is Com Admin Commands In MySQL?

If you’ve ever looked at the COM_XYZ status counters in MySQL’s SHOW STATUS output, you’ve probably seen Com_admin_commands. It’s not clear what this means, but it can be a major…

Query Digesting and String Quoting Syntax in SQL

One of the interesting challenges in writing a system like SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM) is writing a query digesting algorithm that deals with all of the technology-specific features, bugs,…

Compressed Messages Using Kafka

First things first: A big shout out to the engineers at Shopify who work on Sarama, the Go Client we use for Kafka – they do a great job on…