Database

The High Cost and Low Benefit of Unused Index Advice

04/26/18 You have to be careful what you wish for. The signal:noise ratio of finding out which indexes are “unused” is low. This isn’t obvious at first glance, but upon deeper insp…

How to Select the Right Queries to Optimize

04/18/18 Why is selecting the right queries to optimize so important? There are several reasons. Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish Look at the forest, not just the trees, and optimize glob…

Cognitive Bias in IT Decision Making

03/29/18 Logic and objective thinking are hallmarks of any engineering field. IT design and troubleshooting are no exceptions. Computers and networks are systems of logic so we, as…

The Impact Of Coupling On System Design

03/16/18 In system design, every technical decision can be seen as a series of trade-offs. If I choose to implement Technology A it will provide a positive outcome in one way, but …

Assessing Database Health and Performance

03/13/18 Here is an interesting article from my colleague Joe Kim, in which he explores database health and performance. Part of the problem with managing databases is that many pe…

Numeric Optimization in Golang With Nelder-Mead and Gonum

03/12/18 Numeric optimization is a set of techniques for fitting a function to a dataset by iteratively refining estimates. Numeric optimization is one way to do things like curve-…

Disaster Recovery – Time To Create Our Plan!

03/06/18 Thus far, we have gone over how to classify our disasters and how to have some of those difficult conversations with our organization regarding Disaster Recovery (DR). We’…

Announcement: p99 Percentile Metrics

03/01/18 I’m pleased to announce that SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM) offers 99th percentile metrics to help understand latency outliers in a query workload. These m…

How To Buy Software 2018

02/26/18 Buying software solutions for your company is a skill just like any other business practice. To be effective at purchasing it is necessary to have a clear understanding of…

Traveling With Joy

02/26/18 Recently, two people I respect very much tweeted about travel, and how to remain positive and grateful while you do it. You can read those tweets (here) and (here). When I…

Business Continuity – DR Is Really just a Piece of a Much Bigger Cake!

02/20/18 All too often, especially if disaster recovery (DR) is driven and pushed by the IT department, organizations can fall into the common mistake of assuming that they are “go…

T-SQL Tuesday #99: Missing Indexes and Index Key Order

02/13/18 Welcome to the 99th edition of T-SQL Tuesday, hosted this month by friend (and coworker) Aaron Bertrand. We were given a choice and I decided to dive into Aaron’s Index of…