Storage performance is key to the health and performance of a SQL Server database. When storage performance begins to slow down, queries suffer from more waits on disk. These waits can show up as a variety of SQL Server wait types, including WRITELOG and wait types starting with PAGEIOLATCH.

Flyway is an open-source database deployment tool that also includes a paid tier called Teams. Since it’s open-source, you can just download Flyway and run it for free. You’ll get a robust DevOps tool to assist you in deploying your databases just like you deploy your code. It just works. So, why would you even bother to pay for Teams? Actually, there are a number of reasons why people pay for advanced tiers of open-source software in general.

In the latest DBAle podcast episode our hosts, Chris and Chris, tackled what they really mean by cataloging a database and how taking a ‘giraffe’s eye view’ approach to compliance is not enough. That’s because the most common data concerns for managers and execs center around where your sensitive data is, the risk it poses and, if you’re migrating to the cloud, how much sensitive data is being stored on that database or that instance.

One of the most common performance problems with SQL Server databases in production is the blocking of queries, which happens because database resources are locked. Understanding why locking happens is just half the battle. Being able to resolve locking, which will resolve blocking issues as well, is the second half.

It’s never been more critical to protect your data infrastructure against malicious actors, with organizations dealing with an ever-expanding number of increasingly sophisticated attacks. Monitoring solutions represent part of your infrastructure’s attack surface area – they enjoy highly privileged access to the systems they help manage, and store sensitive information about the workloads running on them.

Like all good things in infrastructure, picking whether or not to self-host your database is full of trade-offs. On the one hand, you have the absolute freedom to do whatever it is you want with your database - whether it's adding a useful Postgres extension, or experimenting with new technologies. On the other hand, you now have to dedicate resources to keeping your database reliably online.

PostgreSQL is a popular open-source, object-relational database. As with any other data storage solution, capturing metrics is crucial for making sure your database is reliable, available, and performing optimally. This will help you dig deeper into database performance problems, do performance tuning, optimize queries and indexes, and make partitioning decisions. But that’s not all. You’ll also be able to set up alerts and plan for failures or upgrades.

This question comes up all the time: How do you migrate between monitoring systems? The answer is both simple and complicated. In order to understand this better, rather than just rely on my own knowledge, I reached out to a number of people to see how they accomplished this. I’m going to summarize their process for you here in order to help others who may find themselves in need of this information.

For many businesses, using a Managed Services Provider (MSP) makes sense, particularly when it comes to database management, monitoring and security. They can control costs while still having access to expert resources, and dial up or down the service as required. It’s perhaps no surprise then that 47% of people surveyed in the Channel Futures 2020 MSP 501 Report identified professional services as a growth area, 51% identified enhanced network monitoring, and 85% identified security services.