Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This is a guest post from Laura Copeland. Key insights from a fireside chat with Chris Yates. Part 1. Choosing the right database monitoring vendor isn’t just a technical decision, it’s a strategic one that affects your teams, your estate, your growth plans, and the culture of your organisation. It’s also a personal one if you’re a DBA. Something as critical as your monitoring system will shape your day‑to‑day work, and, in many cases, how well you sleep at night.

Last month, the VictoriaMetrics team gave a talk on retroactive sampling at KubeCon Europe 2026. By writing this blog post, as a transcript of the session, we want to explain how retroactive sampling reduces outbound traffic, CPU, and memory usage in the data collection pipeline significantly compared to tail sampling in OpenTelemetry.

Application delivery has accelerated over the last decade. Modern CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and cloud infrastructure have already raised the baseline. Now AI-assisted coding tools are compressing timelines further still - developers are writing and shipping code faster than ever.

This is a guest post from Adam Atreides. SQL Prompt's March releases focused on Prompt AI improvements and SSMS 22.4 compatibility.

Short Summary: This guide shows how to find and fix slow search queries when performance drops for no clear reason. It covers how to use dbForge tools to check execution plans, look at index fragmentation, and understand “warm-up” behavior so things stay consistent as your data grows.

Even when APIs, cloud connectors, and native integrations dominate the conversation in 2026, Oracle ODBC drivers remain the bedrock of enterprise data flow. They quietly power the BI dashboards you rely on, the Excel reports you trust, and the legacy systems you still depend on. But not all Oracle ODBC drivers deliver the same results. Some are built for speed, stability, and modern analytics workloads, while others struggle to keep up with today’s enterprise demands.

Choosing your Salesforce ADO.NET provider is more than ticking boxes; it’s the foundation of how your.NET apps interact with Salesforce data. That’s why this decision requires careful consideration of critical features, like ORM support, Entity Framework compatibility, query flexibility, and security. However, this process is far from simple; many providers don’t provide enough concrete details upfront.

When you build a.NET app that runs on Oracle, think of your Oracle ADO.NET provider as the engine under the hood. It powers how efficiently your connections run, determining speed, stability, and how smoothly your app deploys. Pick the right provider, and your app hums: fast and reliable. Choose the wrong one? That’s when you hit sluggish performance, driver incompatibilities, deployment headaches, or lack of advanced ORM support. To avoid that, we’ve broken down what works.