Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

So, you have an interview lined up for a sweet new gig as a SQL Server database administrator (DBA). What interview questions will you be asked? How can you make sure you ace the interview? What will make you stand out from the other candidates? There are no concrete answers, because… “it depends.” However, you can count on at least two major components of your interview – a technical component and a non-technical component, often focusing on soft skills.

Moving your database to the cloud using a PaaS option such as Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance reduces the maintenance overhead required from the database administrator (DBA). The DBA no longer must worry about managing backups or configuring high availability, for example. That said, the DBA still needs to tune the database’s performance and monitor SQL workloads. The Azure Portal offers several services to quickly identify performance issues for Azure SQL Databases.

GCP is increasingly being used by teams all over. In this blog, Uzziah explains how CloudSQL is Google Cloud Platform’s solution that provides a managed PostgreSQL and MySQL server. Relational databases are the preferred choice for persisting data in most non-trivial applications. CloudSQL is Google Cloud Platform’s solution that provides a managed PostgreSQL and MySQL server.

A main focus for database administrators (DBAs) is to ensure server environments are optimized and performance is at its peak. Whether you’re a DBA starting in a new role and are evaluating an existing environment for the first time, or you’re a senior database professional with the ongoing task of maintaining optimal performance, following key SQL Server best practices for installing, configuring, and ensuring new instances of SQL Server are consistently deployed is all in a day’s work.

A key finding from Redgate’s recent State of Database Monitoring Survey of over 2,500 IT professionals was that 79% of respondents reported using either a third-party or in-house monitoring tool. It’s notable because it’s an increase of 10 percentage points from the same survey last year – and the satisfaction rate with third-party monitoring tools also saw an increase of 18 percentage points to 86%.

There are a large number of best practices around SQL Server performance tuning – I could easily write a whole book on the topic, especially when you consider the number of different database settings, SQL Server settings, coding practices, SQL wait types, and so on that can affect performance.

Apache Cassandra is a distributed database known for its high availability, fault tolerance, and near-linear scaling. It was initially developed by Facebook, but it is a widely used open-source system used by the largest tech companies in the world. There are numerous reasons behind its popularity, including no single point of failure, exceptional horizontal scaling with a data layout designed as a perfect fit for time-series data.