Database

Probabilistic Sampling With A Sketch

07/10/15 In a previous post, I explained that we observe rich and complex streams of events, something like the following multiplied by a million: And our goal is to choose a sampl…

Selecting Representative Samples From A Stream Of Queries

07/03/15 Sampling is hard. This is the title of a talk I gave at a meetup in Boston a few weeks back. But what’s so hard about sampling anyway? To begin with, let’s clarify what I …

SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor Now Supports Heroku

06/23/15 In November, Database Performance Monitor introduced support for databases hosted on Amazon RDS. In the spirit of monitoring all of the databases on all of the platforms, …

The Strategic Importance of Database Administration

06/17/15 If you draw a diagram of information flow and interaction amongst teams and processes in IT, you’ll probably find that although some parts of the organization are “leaf” o…

Nothing Is Free, Including Buffer Space

06/08/15 Let’s talk a bit about free space in buffer, what SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is showing you, and what it means. The post Nothing Is Free, Including Buffer Space appear…

Improved User Parsing From The MySQL Protocol

06/08/15 This isn’t really a feature we should brag about, because it’s a bug that took us a while to figure out, but we believe in sharing the bad as well as the good. There’s a l…

Parsing the Redis TCP Protocol

06/05/15 When we decided to go beyond just MySQL monitoring, we had a couple of natural next choices. The decision involved engineering effort, the likelihood we’d find MySQL-speci…

Finding Query Samples With Errors And Warnings

06/03/15 You probably have known for a while that SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM) inspects TCP traffic and captures query errors and warnings, so you can find proble…

Siesta – RESTful Services Made Simple in Go

06/01/15 All of our services (external REST APIs and internal services) are written in Go. Like others, we wanted to factor out repeated code, but found it hard to do without makin…

The Five Stages of Debugging

05/22/15 Because it’s Friday afternoon and you may have had a long week, our brainiacs present… The Five Stages Of Debugging: Stage One. Denial – “What do you mean it’s broken!? Th…

Consul for Cluster Health Monitoring

05/22/15 If you’re not familiar with Consul, it’s what I call a cluster management tool. It’s composed of a handful of features such as “Service Discovery,” “Key Value Store,” “DNS…

DBA Personalities: DISC and Values Models

05/20/15 What personality characteristics do great DBAs share? What motivates them? If you’re not sure why you should care, you’re probably not a hiring manager! Hiring and retaini…