Database

Announcing New Free Network Analyzer Tools for MySQL and PostgreSQL

05/13/15 We have released two free tools that will help MySQL and PostgreSQL DBAs understand the queries their database servers execute. As you probably know, we have spent nearly …

Five Steps to Great Trade Show Demos

03/10/15 Spring is approaching, and with it, the season of sponsorships. For vendors, trade shows offer a unique opportunity to gain valuable insight regarding market needs, engage…

Temp Tables, Filesorts, UTF8, VARCHAR, and Schema Design in MySQL

03/02/15 The other day we were doing some peer review on a schema change at SolarWinds and the topic of character set, column length, and the potential downsides of using utf8 came…

See Connection Latency with SolarWinds

02/26/15 Recently, one of our customers reached out to us about a problem they were having trouble diagnosing – they noticed that every once in a while, it took their MySQL server …

Schemaless Databases Don’t Exist

02/24/15 There’s no such thing as a schemaless database. I know, lots of people want a schemaless database, and lots of companies are promoting their products as schemaless DBMSs. …

What Is Com Admin Commands In MySQL?

02/23/15 If you’ve ever looked at the COMXYZ status counters in MySQL’s SHOW STATUS output, you’ve probably seen Comadmincommands. It’s not clear what this means, but it can be a m…

Query Digesting and String Quoting Syntax in SQL

02/16/15 One of the interesting challenges in writing a system like SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM) is writing a query digesting algorithm that deals with all of the…

Compressed Messages Using Kafka

02/11/15 First things first: A big shout out to the engineers at Shopify who work on Sarama, the Go Client we use for Kafka – they do a great job on the library! Alright, now to to…

How Database Performance Monitor Measures Queries

02/10/15 We often get questions about how we measure queries inside MySQL (and now PostgreSQL too). Many of these questions reveal assumptions about the metrics we provide and our …

Distributed and Diverse: The New Reality of Modern Data Persistence

01/23/15 We create applications in an age of simple, powerful, flexible databases that do magic for us. There’s a large variety of modern databases that supply just what’s needed f…

Securing JSON APIs With Wrapper Objects

01/21/15 Security is a top priority. Leading companies such as Zappos, Dyn, and Etsy use Database Performance Monitor (DPM), a cloud-based database performance management service t…

Go’s Connection Pool, Retries, and Timeouts

01/19/15 This is a story of intermittent 500 Internal Server errors from APIs, that ended up being caused by a hardcoded constant in Go’s database/sql package. I’ll mostly spare yo…