07/16/15 I’m happy to announce that we’ve released a new default dashboard for SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM). Why a new dashboard? Simple: reduce the time-to-insig…
07/15/15 We are pretty much raving fans of CircleCI and we are not ashamed to say it. Here’s why. What Does CircleCI Do For Us? It would be reasonable to describe CircleCI like thi…
07/10/15 In a previous post, I explained that we observe rich and complex streams of events, something like the following multiplied by a million: And our goal is to choose a sampl…
07/03/15 Sampling is hard. This is the title of a talk I gave at a meetup in Boston a few weeks back. But what’s so hard about sampling anyway? To begin with, let’s clarify what I …
06/08/15 This isn’t really a feature we should brag about, because it’s a bug that took us a while to figure out, but we believe in sharing the bad as well as the good. There’s a l…
06/05/15 When we decided to go beyond just MySQL monitoring, we had a couple of natural next choices. The decision involved engineering effort, the likelihood we’d find MySQL-speci…
06/03/15 You probably have known for a while that SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM) inspects TCP traffic and captures query errors and warnings, so you can find proble…
05/20/15 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 retaini…
05/13/15 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 …
03/02/15 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…
02/24/15 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. …
02/23/15 If you’ve ever looked at the COMXYZ status counters in MySQL’s SHOW STATUS output, you’ve probably seen Comadmincommands. It’s not clear what this means, but it can be a m…