Database

The Only Source of Knowledge is Experience…

12/06/17 The title of this post is a quote that might be (or not be) from Albert Einstein. I first thought the title of the post would be something like: “why root cause analysis i…

How Can I Become A Microsoft MVP?

12/05/17 This is such a common question that, were I to write a FAQ of questions I get after speaking, it should sit somewhere in the top 3 positions. (Update 19-Dec-2017: This pos…

Monitoring, Analytics, Diagnostics, Observability, and Root Cause Analysis

12/03/17 Monitoring is a hopelessly overloaded term in tech culture. The term now carries decades of inaccurate and imprecise use. The result is that several people can be engaged …

My Life as IT Code: Part 5 – Walking the Wall

11/27/17 In this, my fifth and final post about life hacks, I’ll talk about the communication process, clarifications across all key personnel, and a big approach in how some of th…

The Unifying Force of Data

11/27/17 Someday, we may look back on IT as a subset of social science as much as a technological discipline. Because it sits at the intersection of business and technology, visibi…

My Life as IT Code: Part Four – Exercise and Sandbox

11/16/17 In previous posts in this “My Life” blog series, I’ve written quite a bit about the project management/on-task aspects of how I keep my focus and direction top of mind whi…

Hierarchical Observability with RED

11/07/17 I’ve written before about the minimal set of metrics that can serve effectively as application/service vital signs. One such set is the RED acronym, which stands for Reque…

Monitor Your Citus Cluster With SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor

10/13/17 SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM) has support for monitoring Citus, a scale-out solution for massively sharded data storage and processing using standard open…

Monitoring and Observability With USE and RED

10/05/17 Modern systems can emit thousands or millions of metrics, and modern monitoring tools can collect them all. Faced with such an abundance of data, it can be difficult to kn…

Find Queries That Need Indexes With SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor

09/21/17 Queries can be slow or resource-heavy for many reasons, but one of the most common is that the table doesn’t have a good index for the query. This is true for MySQL, Postg…

Monitoring Isn’t Observability

09/14/17 Observability is all the rage, an emerging term that’s trending up very quickly in certain circles even while it remains unknown in others. As such, there isn’t a single w…

The Basics of Sharding in MongoDB

09/06/17 Sharding is a mechanism widely used in today’s most popular database systems, an effective way to divide, categorize, and organize data into manageable chunks. In some dat…