Database

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…

Monitor MySQL Database Users with VividCortex

01/08/15 VividCortex now supports per-user metrics in Top Queries, so you can monitor MySQL database user activity in detail. By changing the Rank menu from Queries to Users you ca…

New reCaptcha support in angular-recaptcha

12/23/14 Google released a new reCaptcha that is “tough on bots, easy on humans.” It is really simple to use, and it has greatly improved the security against robots and other hack…