Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When you issue a query to SQL Server or Azure SQL, it internally tries to optimize a query plan through calculations such as whether to use an index. Much of SQL Server’s query plans are based on its best guess of what will happen at run time when your query executes. Even when SQL Server guesses right, as your data changes (especially as the volume of data increases), optimal plans can end up performing so poorly, they can drag your whole system’s performance down.

An important skill in database performance tuning is capturing, reading, and understanding query execution plans. The query execution plan is a roadmap of the resources allocated and operations performed when the database engine gathers the results of your query.

There should always be opportunities to laud our peers’ achievements and good work. One of the things I’ve noticed (at least here in America) is we tend to speak up about negative things and more quietly acknowledge the good. I want us to get better at publicly celebrating the success of our peers. IT Pro Day is nearly upon us, and this means there’s an opportunity to recognize our peers through the second annual awards.

The 2020 SolarWinds® IT Pro Day survey looked at the changing roles and responsibilities of IT pros throughout the pandemic. Overall, nearly two-thirds of surveyed IT pros discovered a new sense of confidence, despite contending with challenges such as reduced budgets, greater decision-making responsibilities, and longer hours caused by their organizations’ response to the pandemic.

Recently, my colleagues Pete Di Stefano, Ashley Adams, and I hosted a webcast on the topic of capacity planning and optimization. You can listen/watch it here, it was a really fun conversation. As part of the discussion, we talked about the need to measure the right things to get the correct outcome. Keep in mind my oft-repeated mantra: monitoring is simply the collection of data. You need a robust, mature tool to add context, which transforms those metrics into information.

I began my career as an associate software development engineer in June of 2020, and during my short time in the industry, I’ve had the opportunity to build and troubleshoot continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) pipelines, work on many different technologies within several SolarWinds®, formerly SentryOne, products, and learn proper engineering practices.

This past April, my husband and I took on our most exciting and daunting chapter yet: parenthood. Despite the chaos around us, we made the most of our pregnancy and thoroughly enjoyed sifting through baby clothes, putting together his nursery, choosing a name...the works. When it came time to bring our little guy home, I thought we had relatively grounded expectations for what our lives would look like as a family of three.

You can learn a lot about an organization by looking at their data. For example, if I see “LoanToValue” (LTV) or “CollateralValue,” I could surmise they deal with financial data—specifically loans—in some fashion. Developers and database administrators with domain knowledge about the intrinsic meaning of the data are precious friends. These individuals understand the meaning behind the data and how it works within the applications of the organization.

Last week, my friend and colleague Leon Adato ( t| b) introduced 2021’s IT Pro Day theme “Bring IT On” and observed an IT pros’ life experiences helped to form the foundation of their skillsets and careers, ultimately preparing them for any challenge thrown their way. Whether it’s a pandemic, natural disaster, or a configuration error that takes down a mission critical server—we know IT pros have it in hand.