Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

How database indexes work, when to use B-tree vs hash indexes, clustered vs non-clustered indexes, and how to tell if your indexes are actually helping.

When a database security incident happens, everyone turns to the security team. We look for a simple root cause analysis, and then we add a control, tighten a policy, and maybe even buy a silver bullet tool. We feel progress! But the incident didn’t start there. It started years earlier, when the organization made a series of perfectly reasonable decisions that quietly expanded the surface area and weakened the consistency of control.

This month’s highlights include smarter dependency handling in Flyway Desktop, and a look at how we’re starting the year strong for Oracle users. Plus: last call to share your feedback in our Flyway user survey (the prize draw closes soon!).

Deploying changes to Oracle databases can be complex from working across multiple schemas, handling dependencies, and accounting for environment differences. Flyway has been helping teams bring order and automation to Oracle development for over 15 years and in 2026 we’re accelerating that investment even further. Here’s a look at the latest enhancements available today and what’s coming next for Oracle users.

This is a guest post from Stephanie Herr. One of Flyway’s biggest strengths is its ability to track your database schema as individual SQL DDL scripts on disk. This gives you full version control over every object, along with a complete audit trail of what changed, who changed it, when it changed, and why. For teams working with Oracle and/or SQL Server, this level of transparency is essential and this latest release provides even more support for how you handle changes across dependent objects.

This is a guest post from James Hemson. The January release of Redgate Test Data Manager brings the launch of our free trial, a completely redesigned installation experience, and powerful new workflow capabilities. These updates make it faster to get started and easier to automate your data provisioning pipelines.

This is a guest post from Saskia Parks. If you're exploring test data management (TDM) solutions, you probably know your current practices aren't ideal, but you're skeptical investing in a solution is worth the budget and effort. We hear the same concerns. The perception is that proper TDM is expensive, complicated, and takes months of painful implementation.