Database

Azure SQL Data Warehouse Delivers a Win-Win on Price-Performance

04/25/19 Most organizations are familiar with the constant exercise of prioritizing price or performance, particularly in decisions about technology infrastructure. As businesses b…

Essential Capabilities for Applying DevOps to Your Database

04/09/19 Software industry leaders have been trying to define what DevOps is forever. Most top firms say they’re committed to a holistic DevOps philosophy and they’re trying to put…

Seven SQL Server Signs the Illuminati Exist

04/01/19 The signs that the Illuminati exist are all around us. You can find their marking on our buildings, on our currency, and even in our music videos. The Illuminati thrive by…

A Historical Account of the Professional Association of SQL Server (PASS), Part 1: Foundation

03/18/19 A Historical Account of the Professional Association of SQL Server (PASS) Lately, I’ve been asked many questions about the history and foundation of PASS. As an “old-timer…

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…