Infrastructure at your Service
Is there too much memory for my SQL Server instance? This is definitely an uncommon question I had to deal with of my customers a couple of weeks ago. Usually DBAs complain when they don’t have enough memory for environments they have to manage and the fact is SQL Server (like other SGBDRs) provides a plenty of tools for memory pressure troubleshooting. But what about of the opposite? This question raised in a context of an environment…
This article describes patching a virtualized Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) containing only an ODA_BASE virtual machine. Do this patching first on test machines because it can not be guaranteed that all causes of failures of single VM ODAs are covered in this article. I got the experience that precheck for ODA patches does not detect some failure conditions which may lead to an unusuable ODA. Overview: Patch first to 12.1.2.12.0 After that patch to 12.2.1.4.0…
After the minimal setup of the DC/OS in my further articles, I wanted to extend my DC/OS and add a loadbalancer. There are two options for loadbalancing in DC/OS 1. Marathon-LB (a layer 7 load balancer, used for external requests, based on HAProxy) 2. Named VIPs (a layer 4 load balancer used for internal TCP traffic) In this article we will use Marathon-LB. In case you want to read more about the VIP solution, just…
Some days ago EnterpriseDB released the latest version of its backup and recovery tool for PostgreSQL and EDB Postgres Advanced Server, release notes here. The main new features, at least for me, are backups using multiple cores and parallel incremental restores. Besides that BART does not require pg_basebackup anymore for taking full backups of a PostgreSQL instance. The downside with that could be that you can not easily restore the backups without using EDB BART….
When a patch fails on a virtualized Oracle Database Appliance (ODA), this ODA is often unusuable because Linux and OAKD are patched to new release but Grid Infrastructure is still on old version. OAKD cannot be restarted in default mode because in this mode the active Grid Infrastructure version is checked, which will fail due to old version. Also Grid Infrastructure cannot be started due to the fact that OAKD controls access of shared hardware…
PostgreSQL supports index only scans since version 9.2 which was released in September 2013. The purpose of an index only scan is to fetch all the required values entirely from the index without visiting the table (the heap) at all. Of course that can speed up a query because avoiding to touch the heap, means reading less data and reading less data is obviously faster than reading more data. So index only scans are a…
It’s the 20th anniversary of the event and the keynote today was amazing (see the blog from Christophe) for different reasons but the more important is that is every time better people. Not only DBA’s but also people using their application connected to the database. Today, one of my focus will be the next version of SQL Server 2019 with the session of Bob Ward, Asad Khan & Amit Banerjee from Microsoft. I already tested…
Power BI 5 top custom visuals The development of Power BI itself is fast. But, the means to represent data is too. I mean there are constantly new Power BI custom visuals developed by the community and Microsoft. You can develop your own custom visuals and publish them on the marketplace for your organization or the whole community. Tips : check if the visuals are certified, meaning they have been tested on the different Power…
Optimizing Multi-Billion Row Tables in Tabular in 2018 I wanted to attend the session moderated by Marco Russo to see his approach of optimizing performance in Tabular model The first thing to understand is how the data is stored and organized in a Tabular model. It is of course using the xVelocity in-memory capabilities with the Vertipac column storage layout engine. It organizes the data, compressing it by column, in combination with a dictionary…
The Microsoft data platform is evolving The third day began with the Keynote help by Rohan Kumar the Corporate Vice President of Azure Data by Microsoft The main message was “Hybrid data platform is the way for the future” and Microsoft is working in this direction. The use of AI and analytic to transform the customer business is also a key driver for the Microsoft data platform, which is building to enable this easily. Rohan…
After long hours of flights, Christophe Cosme and I finally arrived in Seattle at the SQL PASS Summit 2018. We picked up our badge and bag and now we are ready to begin… This first day for me started with the pre-conference about SQL Server Security with Denny Cherry. Many topics were discussed like: Network Designs (such as public IP vs. Private IP) Firewall configurations (such as Network Design between Public network, Internal network and…
The Art and Science of Designing Smart Data story This pre-conference session was moderated by Mico Yuk CEO and founder of BI Brainz Mico drove us through the path of BI data visual storytelling and the importance it has to present the data in an attractive way. She warned the session will not be technical at all, I was a bit disappointed about this point, but was curious how she will drive us there….
