In the first post of this two-part series, we talked about the need to fully understand how users experience your website. Without understanding how your end users interact with your site’s pages—what’s working for them and what’s not—you’d be optimizing on a hunch without solid data to guide you.

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a workflow orchestration service used mostly for data integration and transformation. It was first released as part of SQL Server 2005 and continues to receive updates and new features today. While SSIS can be installed and run on a server (on-premises or in the cloud), it’s also available in Azure Data Factory. SSIS is commonly used to perform tasks such as: While SSIS originally only ran on Windows, it has also been available for Linux since 2017.

In advance of this week’s Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a reminder for critical infrastructure to stay vigilant against cyber threats during holidays and weekends. This advisory is a reminder the holidays present a noted challenge for businesses and an opportunity for cyber adversaries.

Keeping your technology organized can be challenging. As you add new devices and phase out old ones, tracking each change can feel insurmountable. However, monitoring these updates is vital for most organizations, making the right network inventory tools indispensable. Finding your best fit might be easier than you think. By understanding your network inventory management options, you can find the most effective software to support your unique IT infrastructure.

The U.S. State Department has a global workforce of 69,000 across more than 270 diplomatic missions. To support the work of its “untethered diplomats,” State’s Bureau of Information Resource Management uses a multi-cloud approach that provides cost-effective, flexible, and reliable access to cloud-based resources, allowing staff to seamlessly collaborate, free from the limitations of VPNs and corporate networks.

In my previous post, Native SQL Server Backup Types and How-To Guide, I discussed the main types of native SQL Server backups and various backup options. Backups are critical to restoring databases quickly, but there isn’t much benefit to having backup files sitting around if you aren’t prepared and know when and how to perform the restores.

SolarWinds® Papertrail™ has supported Heroku almost from the beginning, as an add-on in the Heroku Marketplace and as a compatible standalone log management tool. Heroku’s focus on empowering developers to build and deliver applications by providing an easy-to-use platform as a service fits perfectly with the vision of Papertrail. Both developer-focused technologies can be set up typically in minutes, are easy to use, and offer powerful functions.

If your network operations are slow and inefficient, you could be having issues with your latency. Latency measures how long it takes for data to move from one place to another. There are many reasons why you could be experiencing network latency—propagation time, transmission delays, and processing delays are all common causes of latency. When latency occurs, it negatively affects the performance of your network.

Many factors have led to the massive increase of online retail sales in 2020 and 2021, including the increasing reliance of online activities from COVID-19. To put the growth into perspective: in 2017 when we last reported on web performance for the world’s leading retail sites, the industry generated around $2.2 trillion in revenue. In 2021, global e-commerce sales are expected to hit $4.921 trillion.

In a world where 1.145 trillion MB of data is generated every day, the art of database management has become more important than ever. I use the word “art” because it captures a sense of the wizardry needed to effectively manage data. After all, our world is dominated by mobile devices and hybrid IT environments. Database migrations happen regularly, and data resides both on-premises and in the cloud. All these things have brought a new complexity to database management.

Let’s face it—the harsh reality, seen often in news stories today, is that security breaches are going to happen. In today’s world of cybercriminals and nation-state attackers, it’s not a question of “if” but “when” your organization is attacked. If you don’t take appropriate steps to ensure sensitive data is protected properly, it could devastate the organization financially.

One of the easier ways to improve the performance of your SQL Server and Azure SQL database queries is to ensure you choose the right data types for your data, and the data types in your application’s code match the ones in your stored procedures and queries. Choosing the right data type conserves space, because doing something like choosing a variable character type for data of fixed, regular length like a phone number or national ID number is wasteful.