Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

April 2023

Embracing Observability with InfluxDB 3.0: Unlimited Cardinality and Native SQL Support

As the complexity of modern applications continues to increase, so too does the demand for comprehensive observability solutions. Organizations looking to enhance their applications’ performance, reliability, and scalability need powerful tools that allow them to monitor, analyze, and visualize their infrastructure. One such tool is InfluxDB 3.0, a time series database designed to handle large-scale monitoring and analytics workloads.

What is Differential Backup (SQL Server)

Even though SQL (Structured Query Language) has been around since the 1970s, it’s still a relevant and widely-used tool in today’s IT world. Many organizations around the globe still rely on SQL server databases to store their confidential data. In order to protect this valuable information, IT professionals often use differential backup to protect data in SQL servers. As you know, there are multiple types of backup available, so why use differential for SQL servers?

7 ways businesses can improve the quality and speed of database releases

The quality of database releases relies on thorough initial testing in development with teams needing access to fast, reliable data. While database testing is one of the most challenging aspects of development, processes which utilize database clones can overcome these issues. A database clone is a complete and fully functioning copy of a database that is identical to the original in terms of the metadata and the data.

Enhancing Database Capabilities with Multi-Database and User Management

In the past few months, our team has worked hard to enhance our database features. We've made significant updates to our database management capabilities, giving our customers the ability to manage multiple logical databases on the same server (or cluster) and to create custom database users.

Distributed Database Architecture: What Is It?

Databases power all modern applications. They’re behind your Angry Birds mobile game as much as they’re behind the space shuttle. In the beginning, databases were hosted on a single physical machine. Basically, it was a computer running only one program: the database. Then we moved to running databases on virtual machines, where resources are shared among multiple operating systems and applications.

Battling database performance

Earlier this year, we experienced intermittent timeouts in our application while interacting with our database over a period of two weeks. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t immediately identify a clear cause; there were no code changes that significantly altered our database usage, no sudden changes in traffic, and nothing alarming in our logs, traces, or dashboards. During that two-week period, we deployed 24 different performance and observability-focused changes to address the problem.

Q1 Roadmap Review & Q2 2023 Look Ahead

In our recent virtual meetup the VictoriaMetrics Founders team discussed some of our Q1 2023 highlights, including features highlights, the 2023 roadmap for VictoriaMetrics as well as first introduction to the upcoming VictoriaLogs. In this blog post, we’d like to share a summary of these highlights and a heads up on where to find our team in the coming weeks and months - starting with our participation at KubeCon Europe 2023.

Releasing Graphite Query Language in Open Source VictoriaMetrics

As many of our users and the wider monitoring community will know, Graphite Query Language is a query language for Graphite monitoring tools, which helps analyze data stored in it. Graphite is a well-known and respected pioneer in the monitoring space, which has seen a number of next generation monitoring solutions enter the scene … such as ourselves. It’s been used by a wide range of companies, which started using monitoring tools more than a decade ago.

How to monitor MySQL performance metrics in minutes

MySQL, a leading open source database for the past few decades, underpins potentially millions of applications, from tiny prototypes to internet-scale e-commerce solutions. The beauty of MySQL is not only its powerful relational database capabilities but also that it can be scaled up as the application grows. Why should you care about MySQL performance? Because MySQL is the backbone of many applications, your application performance will be inherently tied to your MySQL database performance.

A Detailed Guide to Formatting Dates in SQL

In modern software applications, time-stamped data is a common requirement. As a software developer or database administrator, you know that formatting dates is crucial for ensuring data accuracy and consistency. But with so many date formats and SQL engines out there, it can be challenging to find the right way to format dates for your specific needs.

How DevOps is shaping Financial Services #3: The impact of technical debt

In this series of blog posts, we speak with database professionals from Financial Services organizations around the world to better understand how DevOps is shaping the sector. On the way, we dig into key current factors including the rise of technology upstarts in fintech and insurtech, the speed of digital transformation and the ever-increasing threat of cyberattacks.

Introducing VMware GemFire 10

The next major release of VMware GemFire is now available! GemFire is a high-speed in-memory database for low-latency applications. Focused on resiliency and consistency, GemFire makes it easy to scale your data and support business-critical applications, whether they are on-premises, in the cloud, or somewhere in between. GemFire 10* was pre-announced at the SpringOne Essentials conference in January and later released as a public beta.

Top 5 important metrics you need to be monitoring in your MySQL server

MySQL is an open-source relational database management system that operates based on the client-server model by using SQL as its mode of communication. It is the second most popular database in the world owing to its flexible and scalable nature, high security, ease of use, and ability to handle large data sets seamlessly. Due to its wide range of functionalities, MySQL is employed as part of the database management system for several high-profile companies such as Facebook, PayPal, and Twitter.

How to monitor Microsoft SQL Server performance with Grafana Cloud

A database is one of the most critical components for almost every application. Making sure it is running with the expected read and write latencies is paramount. This can be the difference between a smooth, pleasing user experience and a slow, error-filled one that makes your customers turn their back on a product — and never come back.

Redgate opens the doors to cross-database DevOps Test Data Management

A constant challenge for many development teams is how to include test data management in the development process. Testing with consistent, realistic and compliant datasets, and bringing the database into CI and DevOps pipelines, has been shown to catch data-related issues long before they reach customers. The result: an increase in efficiency, a reduction in costs, and an improvement in the quality of software releases, enabling value to be released to customers faster.

How to get started with monitoring Apache Cassandra with Grafana Cloud

Apache Cassandra is a highly scalable, open source NoSQL database system designed to handle large amounts of data across multiple commodity servers with no single point of failure. Apache Cassandra can be run as a single node but starts making sense when its run in a cluster setup. The system is optimized for high write throughput and is known for its ability to handle big data workloads with ease at super-low latencies.

How DevOps is shaping Financial Services #2: The challenges in insurance

In this series of blog posts, we speak with database professionals from Financial Services organizations around the world to better understand how DevOps is shaping the sector. On the way, we dig into key current factors including the rise of technology upstarts in fintech and insurtech, the speed of digital transformation and the ever-increasing threat of cyberattacks.

How to Choose the Right Database in 2023

Databases are often the biggest performance bottleneck in an application. They are also hard to migrate from once being used in production, so making the right choice for your application’s database is crucial. A big part of making the right decision is knowing what your options are. The database landscape has been changing rapidly in the past few years, so this article will try to simplify things for you by going over the following topics.

5 Redis data types in 5 minutes

Redis is a powerful in-memory data store that servers for a variety of use cases such as: caching, real time analytics or even fraud detection. It comes with a set of different data types and in this video we will learn about the 5 more common data types used in Redis. Sébastien Blanc's social media: CHAPTERS ABOUT AIVEN Aiven’s cloud data platform helps your business reach its highest potential by making your data work for you.