Database

How to Architect and Build Highly Observable Systems 2019

03/08/19 We’ve completely revised one of our most popular free ebooks, How to Architect and Build Highly Observable Systems. This book, originally written in 2015, has been downloa…

Using FORCE INDEX: When Your Query Optimizer Gets It Wrong

02/17/19 A Guest Post from Jordan Raine, Clio Jordan Raine is a staff software developer at Clio, the leading provider of legal practice management, client relationship management,…

Databases, Shift-Left, and Empathy: What You Missed at DevOpsDays Charlotte

02/15/19 Last week several people from SolarWinds® traveled to attend DevOpsDays Charlotte, where I gave the opening keynote, we had a table to demonstrate our product, we caught u…

Inspecting Index Usage In MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB

02/08/19 In my recent post about the Left-Prefix Index Rule, I explained how queries can use all or part of a compound (multi-column) index. Knowing what makes an index fully usabl…

The Left-Prefix Index Rule

02/05/19 There’s an important heuristic in database indexing that I call the left-prefix rule. It helps you understand whether the database will be able to make the best use of a m…

Covering Indexes in MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB

02/01/19 A covering index is a fantastic query performance optimization. An index covers a query when the index has all the data needed to execute the query, so the server can retr…

The Iron Triangle of Sorting, Indexing, and Temporary Storage

01/30/19 Databases have a kind of iron triangle for specific types of query plans, whereby they can pick between two out of three things but can’t get all three of them. (The “iron…

What Is Concurrency in a Database?

01/28/19 Databases are confusing! Not only are they complicated bits of software, but database jargon is really complicated. Part of this comes from the number of words with multip…

How to Clean Dirty Data – The Life of a Data Janitor

01/24/19 If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my decades as a data professional, it’s this: Things aren’t what you think they are. Data’s ultimate purpose is to drive decisions. Bu…

Your ORM and SELECT FOR UPDATE

01/23/19 What’s an ORM? If you’re not familiar with ORMs, an ORM is an Object-Relational Mapper, which helps you map objects in your code to tables in your database, without writin…

SolarWinds Lab Episode 72: Two Geeks and a Goddess II: Azure the Easy Way

01/21/19 IT pros are discovering a smarter way to manage servers. In this episode, Microsoft Cloud advocate Phoummala Schmitt (@ExchangeGoddess), Head Geek™ and 10-year Microsoft M…

Three Ways to Become Data-Centric

01/10/19 The conservation of quantum information is a theory that information can neither be created nor destroyed. Stephen Hawking used this theory to explain how a black hole doe…