Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Behind every modern.NET application is an ADO.NET provider handling database connections, queries, and ORM operations behind the scenes. As applications become more cloud-native and data-intensive, that provider layer has become far more important than many teams realize. Performance, scalability, deployment reliability, and even developer workflow can all depend on the quality of the provider underneath the application.

We are excited to announce the release of the brand new line of MCP Servers (Model Context Protocol), designed to connect AI assistants, AI agents, and large language models directly to enterprise databases and cloud business platforms. The release includes 19 specialized MCP Servers and the flagship Universal MCP Server, which enables AI access to virtually any data source through the ODBC standard.

Redgate Monitor ships new features every month and the past few months have brought some exciting new additions to empower your workflows. Spanning AI-powered tooling, cloud deployment, cross-database platform support and enterprise security, these updates reflect some of the biggest areas shaping how database teams work today. Whether you're managing compliance requirements, trying to get on top of alert management or looking to get a better grip on cloud costs, there's something here for you.

The NoSQL Storm explores core Database DevOps concepts and the real-world challenges teams face while managing modern NoSQL environments. It highlights the complexities of schema evolution, scaling distributed systems, and maintaining operational reliability as applications grow.

Without experiment infrastructure to help you test your LLM applications, every research session starts with the same questions: What have we tried previously? What were the numbers? Which prompt version produced that result? Why did we discard that approach? The answers live in scattered notes, terminal history, and half-remembered conversations. Each handoff between sessions loses context. In practice, iteration can slow down as teams get bogged down in testing and analysis.

We always knew that Airbnb’s engineering is operating on a completely different scale, and their new high-volume metrics pipeline is proof of that. This is one of those rare stories where scale and efficiency go hand in hand - they modernized their observability stack with open source components and reduced cost by an order of magnitude. Airbnb is now processing more than 100 million samples per second on a single production cluster.

When a PostgreSQL query runs slowly, engineers often start with EXPLAIN ANALYZE. The output is a tree of plan nodes, each one describing a step the database took to execute it. A query with several joins and a subquery can produce 20 or more nodes. But the plan gives no visual indication of which node corresponds to each clause in the SQL text. Diagnosing the problem means viewing the plan in one window and the query in another, manually tracing connections between them.

11 takeaways from the Simple Talk podcast on security vs speed in databases: why teams misjudge risk, how AI amplifies bad habits, and what to do about it.