I’m inordinately proud to work for Redgate Software. One of the biggest reasons for my pride is because I can say, without equivocation, we make fantastic software that will help you do your job better, easier, and faster. However, there was one piece of software, many years ago now, that I wasn’t so proud of. Let me put it this way: I tried to get rid of SQL Monitor.

Chris Yates is a Senior Vice President, Managing Director at Republic Bank, one of the most innovative and forward looking banks in the US. For the last five years and more, he and the bank have been working to introduce DevOps to their database development process. Along the way he has had the opportunity to be joined on his DevOps journey by several of his colleagues who have played an instrumental part in enabling cross collaboration among the development teams.

We now have ever-expanding digital identities to live our daily lives and, whether it’s crossing international borders or more innocuously buying basic products and services, our digital footprint is growing. With the increasing requirement to have a digital identity to do just about anything, our data is constantly being shared online. That said, the demands on FinTech companies to keep personally identifiable information (PII) safe are more pressing than ever.

Join any conversation about cybersecurity in Australia and the Essential Eight Maturity Model may well be mentioned.

Before you can answer this question, I like to step back and take a good look at the history of computing. Mainframes and legacy client-server applications were monolithic—all the processing took place on a single set of hardware. As hardware grew cheaper, and especially after widespread hardware virtualization came to fruition, these trends gave way to the widespread development of distributed systems. I began to see this trend during my time as an architect at a large cable and telecom provider.

In this tutorial you will learn how to use the Flux query language to enrich time series data stored in InfluxDB by combining it with metadata stored in a relational database.

Setting up an HTTP interface to a database can be a lot of work. Read on to see how PostgREST makes it quick and simple to provide RESTful access to PostgreSQL®.

One of the most fundamental concepts in any relational database management system (RDBMS), such as SQL Server, is the transaction. During my consulting career, I've seen many performance problems caused by developers not understanding how transactions work in SQL Server. In this tutorial, I'll explain what transactions are, why they're necessary, and how they work in SQL Server.

Some time ago, Aliaksandr Valialkin published a medium post about comparing VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus resource usage when scraping metrics from thousands of targets. He used node_exporter as a source for metrics to scrape, which is very close to most real-world scenarios. However, the benchmark itself was just a bunch of scripts and a lot of manual work for every test.

Check out the latest improvement to PostgreSQL replication to which our OSPO team contributed to help solve reliability problems.

I recently had a cloud migration client who was at the beginning stage of their discovery phase and looking to jump straight to “which database platforms should I be using in the cloud?” - a tall ask you might say, but following the three steps below they were able to discover and analyze all of their database servers in just two weeks.

Data is the lifeblood of businesses, and protecting it is incredibly important. One of the ways DBAs help ensure the continuous availability of data is through database backups, a process involving copying the data and schema from a database and saving them elsewhere for retrieval later. But like any other process in IT, database backups have costs, benefits, and risks associated with them.

Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) database offering for modern cloud applications. It’s a fully managed service that runs on the latest version of the SQL Server database engine, enabling you to create highly available and performant database instances without needing to maintain hardware upgrades, patches, or backups.

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed key metrics for monitoring Microsoft Azure SQL databases. We also looked at how your database resource and audit logs complement metrics to provide more insight into database performance, activity, and security. In this post, we’ll show you how to collect metrics and logs from your database instances and monitor them with Azure’s monitoring and reporting tools.

In Part 2 of this series, we showed you how to monitor Azure SQL Database metrics and logs using the Azure platform. In this post, we will look at how you can use Datadog to monitor your Azure SQL databases alongside other technologies in your infrastructure. Datadog provides turn-key integrations for Azure along with more than 500 other technologies, enabling you to track long-term performance trends across all systems in your infrastructure, not just your SQL databases.

As the well-known saying goes, by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. This might not be true of everything in life, but it certainly is true of job interviews. Whether you’re preparing for a product design interview at Redgate, or elsewhere, here are some key considerations to help ensure that you get your preparations right.

How do you know your SQL Server system is running well? Is it the simple method of noting no one is complaining? (Sadly, in many businesses, this is exactly how it's done.) The fact is, if you're not monitoring SQL Server performance, you don't know.

2021 was a great year for VictoriaMetrics! We delivered a lot of new features, our team doubled in size, and so did the list of public case studies written by VictoriaMetrics users as well as the community contributions to the product. See our 2021 Momentum blog post for details on all our achievements last year. All this wouldn’t be possible without our supportive community, their help, patience and creativity.

The 2021 year is finished, so it’s time to look at changes VictoriaMetrics has gained during the past year. The first release in 2021 was v1.52.0. The last release in 2021 was v1.71.0. More than 20 new releases of VictoriaMetrics were published during the 2021. The full changelog is available at this page. Let’s look at the most interesting changes.

Oh goody, I’m so tickled to get this one. *rubs hands gleefully* Funny story, back in 2016–2017 we thought we were building Honeycomb primarily for DB use cases. The use cases are that killer. I’ve never seen another tool do the kinds of things you can do on the fly with Honeycomb and databases.

We took advantage of the quiet days between holidays to look back on the year past and thank our users and customers for their support in 2021 - and wish you a very happy 2022!

An email recently came to our team (the Redgate Advocates) asking us what we thought the key challenges for data professionals might be in 2022. Kathi Kellenberger, Steve Jones and I each answered independently. We all bring different experiences and thoughts to the table, yet we all came up with three common themes. Here is what we all feel is likely to be of the most importance this year.