Database

Is That Query Bad?

12/03/15 This post is part of an ongoing series on the best practices for effective and insightful database monitoring. Much of what’s covered in these posts is not intuitive, yet …

A Trendline Is a Model

11/30/15 This post is part of an ongoing series on the best practices for effective and insightful database monitoring. Much of what’s covered in these posts is unintuitive, yet vi…

The Value of Log Structured Merge Trees

11/20/15 Indexes are usually built by way of a data structure; typically, that structure takes the form of a “tree.” Most commonly, the structure of choice is a B-Tree, which is a …

Capacity Planning with the Universal Scalability Law

11/13/15 “How much load can this system sustain?” is a common question in capacity planning. The practical purpose is usually something like the following: How soon will the system…

Introducing Query Anomaly Detection

11/11/15 Anomaly detection sure is a hot topic. We’ve written about it ourselves a number of times, and Preetam Jinka and I just co authored a book for O’Reilly called Anomaly Dete…

Nobody Loves Graphite Anymore

11/06/15 Many of our customers use Graphite, and I don’t think anyone would argue with me when I say it’s probably the most commonly used time series database in the DevOps communi…

Troubleshooting SQL Server, Part 2 : Inside or outside? Error or Not?

10/26/15 In the popular white paper entitled Troubleshooting SQL Server Wait Statistics, I take you through three scenarios in which a wait stats-only approach is insufficient or e…

Great Advice on Monitoring Amazon RDS For MySQL From Datadog

10/21/15 Our friends at Datadog just published an insanely great three part series on monitoring Amazon RDS for MySQL using Datadog. You should go read that now. Full disclosure, I…

What If You Can’t Trace End-to-End?

10/15/15 A lot of monitoring systems have a goal of end-to-end tracing, from “click to disk” or something similar. This is usually implemented by adding some kind of tracing inform…

Queueing Theory: Faster Trains Might Make London Underground Slower

10/10/15 Let’s take a look at a great real-world example that effectively illustrates how queuing theory can be unintuitive even in situations that seem simple. A recent BBC report…

Mastering the Sort Buffer and sort_buffer_size

10/02/15 The sort buffer, which is controlled by the sortbuffersize setting, is probably one of the most-discussed MySQL settings. Interestingly, in many cases it has a lot less po…

Troubleshooting SQL Server, Part 1 : Do You Use These Shortcuts?

09/30/15 In the popular white paper entitled Troubleshooting SQL Server Wait Statistics, I take you through three scenarios in which a wait stats-only approach is insufficient or e…