Database

Requirements for Selecting Effective Samples From an Event Stream

03/18/16 There are good and bad ways to select a sample from a stream of events. Depending on how you do it, the resulting sample might be biased or incomplete in various ways. In …

Understanding Your SQL Server Monitoring: Part 3 – Memory (RAM)

03/03/16 In this series, I’ve tried to help you see the importance of SQL Server® monitoring, and also understand what that monitoring is telling you. So far, we’ve looked at how s…

Drinking from the Firehose: How SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor Compresses its Metrics

02/23/16 Sometimes, when working with a top-of-the-line monitoring tool, having access to the best possible visibility, granularity, and reliability is simply not enough. Sure, tho…

Anomaly Detection for Monitoring – A New eBook

01/27/16 We’re excited to share Anomaly Detection for Monitoring a new, free eBook written by Preetam Jinka and Baron Schwartz. In the eBook, published in collaboration with Ruxit …

Queueing Theory: London Underground Escalator Policy Challenges Social Norms

01/19/16 In 2016, we published our eBook Everything You Need to Know About Queueing Theory, and as part of its launch, we blogged about one way (of the many) queueing theory has re…

Analyzing Spark’s MPP Scalability with the USL

01/13/16 Over at the Percona Performance Blog, Vadim recently published benchmark results for Apache Spark, and the shape of the graphs caught my eye. Here’s one of Vadim’s charts:…

The Factors That Impact Availability, Visualized

12/21/15 We all want our systems to have high availability, but sometimes the exact meaning of “high availability” isn’t very clearly defined. However, availability — like scalabil…

8 Reasons Why ChatOps Isn’t Working At Your Company

12/16/15 About a year and half ago I published a blog post about ChatOps at VividCortex (if you’re unfamiliar with ChatOps, that original post still serves as a good primer). At th…

See the Details with 1-Second Resolution Data

12/05/15 We’ve talked a lot about the high-resolution data we capture, but if you haven’t experienced it yourself, it might be a little abstract. Here, look at the difference betwe…

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 …