Database

What is Database Index Selectivity?

07/18/18 I wrote recently about database cardinality, and there’s a closely related topic that is equally confusing and I want to explain too: index selectivity. Index selectivity …

A Million Little Things: Strive for Greater Efficiency

07/13/18 OK, so a million is a little bit of an exaggeration, but there are tons of cool features inside our SentryOne solutions that I find a lot of our customers and evaluators d…

Five Common Problems with SQL Server

07/12/18 I am fortunate that I still work with SQL Server daily, and consulted from time to time on various projects and performance troubleshooting. It helps keep my skills sharp.…

How NOT to Monitor Your Database

06/28/18 Do you have experience putting out backend database fires? What were some things you wished you had done differently? Proactive database monitoring is more cost efficient,…

SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor & Grafana: Better Together

06/19/18 Many of our customers have asked us to integrate with Grafana, the popular open platform for analytics and monitoring. The wait is over: we’ve released a plugin that lets …

After It Broke: Executing Good Postmortems

06/19/18 No matter how much automation, redundancy, and protection you build into your systems, thing are always going to break. It might be a change breaking an API to another sys…

Five Must-dos of Database Performance Management

06/19/18 Here is an interesting article from my colleague Joe Kim, in which he explores database performance management. Databases are complex, multifaceted, and vital to the healt…

Choosing What to Monitor – Understanding Key Metrics

06/18/18 Monitoring has always been a loosely defined and somewhat controversial term in IT organizations. IT professionals have very strong opinions about the tools they use, beca…

Customizing Logwatch for Sysadmin Needs

06/18/18 Logwatch is essentially a system log analyzer and reporter. It elaborates logs that are simply collected by syslog. This kind of evolution is simplifying the daily job of …

Six Ways to Protect your Database Backups

06/15/18 I often see forum posts from accidental administrators who want to know how to recover data without a backup. The short answer is, “Now is a good time to work on your resu…

Be Responsive and Responsible

06/13/18 Over the years, I’ve read more than a few articles about the qualities that are found in the best administrators. These articles focus on soft skills, but sometimes will l…

How DevOps Changes Monitoring

06/13/18 One of the most interesting changes that I have observed in my career is Microsoft shifting from just being a development organization to truly becoming a DevOps team, in …