Traditionally, DBAs are the ones primarily tasked with maintaining high availability and peak performance of the database environment. Therefore, they assume the responsibility of evaluating Performance Monitoring solutions. This requires identifying the diagnostics needs specific to the environment. With the *DevOps workflow becoming more popular, DBAs and Developers are finding it to be mutually beneficial to find efficient ways to proactively address database performance.

What has become a typical theme in the arena of Information Technology are the concerns around managing costs associated with these systems. Whether it be the capital and operating expenditures associated with the data center, or the ongoing costs associated with everyday management and maintenance, most organizations want better control over what seems to be an ever-growing IT budget.

If you missed the recent webcast on SQL performance tuning presented by Janis Griffin, you are definitely going to want to watch it on-demand. She packed so much information into 60 minutes, it’s a wonder there weren’t thousands of heads exploding across WebEx – and every nugget of advice was pure gold. Let’s start with Janis’ 30+ year career as a DBA across multiple platforms, especially Oracle and SQL Server. She knows her stuff and knows how to talk about it.

We were recently asked if Foglight can be used to monitor Google Cloud SQL instances, specifically MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server. To clarify, these are the PaaS (or DBaaS) offerings from Google. Within Google Cloud Platform, you can use Compute Engine virtual machines and monitor the databases and OS's on those like you normally would with Foglight. The answer from our testing is that it "more-or-less" works.. This is not an official support endorsement however. That remains TBD.