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10 Tips For Managing Database Management Data
Did you ever stop to think that you need to manage your database management data* just as well as you do your "regular" organizational data? That means you should be practicing what you preach. There's a heap of clichés I can use here…and I probably will. We've talked about Questions, Data and Getting to Answers in this…
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Making performance metrics make sense to your business
A lot of times as administrators or infrastructure people we all too often get stuck “keeping the lights on”. What I mean by this, is we have our tools and scripts in place to monitor all of our services and databases, we have notification set up to alert us when they are down or experiencing trouble, and we have our…
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An Introduction to Database Sharding With SQL Server
One of my favorite consulting questions to ask when dealing with a scalability problem is, “If you could change the system design with the knowledge you have today, what would/wouldn’t you change and why?” Sometimes it’s best to ask this question on a one-on-one basis with different developers, DBAs, report writers, and…
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Converting Physical Database Servers to Virtual Machines
I’m in the middle of tough project right now, a large client is trying to convert a large number of physical SQL Servers to virtual machines. They’ve done most of the right things—the underlying infrastructure is really strong, the storage is more than an adequate, and they aren’t overprovisioning the virtual environment.…
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Data is Power
You have the power right at your fingertips. With access to the right data your fingers can make positive changes for your organization. Chances are high that if you manage databases, servers, and other IT services you have access to the data you need to make things better for you, your company, and your customers. I talk…
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It's always the databases' fault!
We all have them lurking around in our data centers. Some virtual, some physical. Some small, some large. At times we find them consolidated onto one server, other times we see many of them scattered across multiple servers. There’s no getting away from it – I’m talking about the database. Whether its’ relational or…
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Answers in Data: So Much Data...So Little Time...Data Time Zones
As you've been following along, I started this series with Data Is Power .In my original graphic I listed QUESTIONS, DATA, ANSWERS as the information pipeline we need to keep systems humming. I provided a list of questions I might ask in Question Everything. A few of you jumped in with some more great questions. One…
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Question Everything...
In my last post, Data is Power, I talked about the need to bring data to decision makers to support your requests for more resources. We had a good discussion there about whether or not data is enough and what sorts of experiences people have had getting management to act. I said that QUESTIONS lead to DATA which lead to…
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To the cloud!
Private, Public, Hybrid, Infrastructure as a Service, Database as a Service, Software Defined Datacenter; call it what you will but for the sake of this post I’m going to sum it all up as cloud. When virtualization started to become mainstream we seen a lot of enterprises adopt a “virtualization first” strategy, meaning…
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The importance of baselining - and baselining often!
For the most part most database performance monitoring tools do a great job at real-time monitoring – by that I mean alerting us when certain counter thresholds are reached, such as Page Life Expectancy below 300 or Memory Pages per Second is too high. Although this is definitely crucial to have setup within our…