Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We spoke to data professionals from a range of industries about the impact of unreliable database deployments — not just on their systems, but on their workload, time, and well-being. From delayed releases to weekend firefighting, and the fallout for teams and customers, they share the day-to-day pressures they face and the small changes that help make deployments, and life, a little less stressful. What stood out from these conversations?

It’s a wonderful day to announce our grand new release dbForge 2025.1, which comprises an update of dbForge tools for all database systems, including SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL.

If writing SQL code is part of your daily work, you won’t be surprised by things like context-aware code completion, as-you-type syntax validation, and debugging. All of them are designed to enhance and speed up your SQL coding. But what if we said that you could completely reshape your experience with an AI-powered assistant? What if you could have your error-free queries generated, analyzed, and optimized in just a couple of moments?

Grafana Tempo 2.8 is officially here, delivering new TraceQL features, performance improvements, and bug fixes, as well as some breaking changes. Watch the video below to learn more about the TraceQL features, or continue reading to get a quick overview of these and other updates. If you’re looking for something more in-depth for all of the changes that happened in this release, head over to the Grafana Tempo 2.8 release notes or the changelog.

I’ve been building apps with SQL Server for years. Everything worked well until I started dealing with sensor data, stock trade volume, and IoT telemetry. As the volume of time-stamped records grew into the millions, I saw relational databases struggling with workloads they weren’t designed for. That’s when I explored time series databases. The performance improvements were significant, but what surprised me was the mental shift required.

VictoriaMetrics Cloud continues to evolve as the most efficient, scalable and open platform in the observability landscape. In our last Q1 update blogpost, we shared new features such as seamless OpenTelemetry integrations, new Organizations support, and improvements in the Explore UI and APIs. This time we wanted to take a minute to showcase how we’re taking the interoperability journey very seriously. Integrations in VictoriaMetrics Cloud Haven’t tried VictoriaMetrics Cloud yet?

We’re excited to announce the release of SQL Prompt Version 11.0. SQL Prompt Version 11.0 adds support for SQL Server Management Studio 21 (SSMS 21) and includes compatibility with Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL Pools—building on our existing support for Azure Synapse Serverless SQL Pools. Read on to find out more about this new support along with other recent improvements to SQL Prompt.

This discussion is a part of the Basic Series serving as the starting point to quickly get you started with VictoriaMetrics. vmagent is a lightweight metrics collection agent that acts as a bridge between your applications and monitoring storage systems like VictoriaMetrics.