Recently, during one of my missions, a client asked me to give him access rights to the SQL Server logs from SSMS to his application managers. As you know, you must grant the role “securityadmin” to have such rights. However, with this role you can also manage logins, CREATE DATABASEs and change passwords.

These are “too many rights” for an IT manager, but there seems to be no other way ... or is there?

Since the third CTP version of SQL Server 2012 (codename Denali), there are some new features available to provide an additional value like the for other Microsoft SQL Server versions. These are pooled in the so called 'Feature Pack' as well as in the 'Manageability Tool Kit'. Both are already available, but not in the final version. I have compiled all information in this blog to find it easily. All DBAs should know that Feature Pack exists, how to find it, and of course use it.

Starting with MySQL 5.5 it is possible to configure semi-synchronous replication. As you probably know, MySQL replication is asynchronous by default. Asynchronous replication means that events/transactions applied on one server are not immediately applied on the other one.

For a few months, I have been testing the new  SQL Server 2012 (codename Denali) and I was very surprised from the DMVs of this version. Dynamic management views (DMVs) return server state information that can be used to monitor the health of a server instance, diagnose problems and tune performance. I will focus on some DMVs which are very interesting for a DBA.

MySQL 5.6 offers improved partition maintenance through "partition exchange". Even if not yet available, dbi services performed some tests on the MySQL Community Edition 5.6.2 m5 release (still under development).

Performance tunning is becoming a key focus for most of the DBAs. In scope of the "dbi services labs", I made some tests on functions which can help improving these, but which are not always well-known. Today's article is going to describe one of these, the SPARE COLUMNS.
The property of Spare columns is not the most used in client environment that we have seen.
This article present a script to find the potential columns that can have the sparse property with the usage restrictions to make a space tuning in your database and especially for Data Warehouse (DWH).

The database example that we used, is AdventureWorksDW2008R2.

Last week at a customer, I used DBUA to upgrade an Oracle database from 10g to 11g and the migration ran successfully. However, the day after I got a monitoring message that the diag directory is growing very rapidly.

Aprés le post sur « Utilisons les securefile », revenons sur le sujet LOB avec une approche performance, stockage. Nous rencontrons parfois des modèles de données étranges, nous aurions envie en tant que DBA de tout reprendre à zéro pour refaire un modele relationnel en 3eme forme normale (3NF), plus efficace et mieux conçu dans notre « RDBMS » favori, mais la réalité étant ce qu'elle est nous devons faire avec, et au mieux. De plus Oracle n'est pas qu'une base de données relationnelle :-) on l'oublie trop souvent.

This post describes some basic Oracle database management issues database administrators might be confronted with. It is about space management and differences observed while monitoring the available space from several point of views (tablespace/datafile) in Grid Control 11g. It also relates and explains an issue (ORA-01652) observed on pre 11.2 Oracle releases (targets) concerning the tablespace/datafile space management and the recycle bin.

La nouvelle version d'Oracle SQL Developer (version 3.0.03.45) est prête pour les administrateurs de base de données/DBA (voici une vidéo sur cette version). Elle s'est vue agrémentée d'outils nécessaires aux tâches d'administration. Les tests ci-dessous vous présentent, à travers quelques copies d'écrans, les fonctionnalités de l'outil,  en espérant vous donner l'envie de l'adopter.

What is finally the primary objective of a database? Storing Data

The question is, how Oracle makes it. For many beginners, a confusing topic is to get the picture between physical storage and logical one. So how does it work?

Are you experiencing network access issues after a migration to Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2)? If yes, you have to make sure the concerned PL/SQL packages get access to your network again. This posting will show you how.

Well, I have read many posts about this, but was unable to find a suitable solution up to now … Google was not my friend

Depuis la sortie de la version Oracle 11g R2, il y a désormais de nombreuses raisons d'utiliser ASM (Automatic Storage Management) pour gérer l'espace disque des bases de données Oracle.

Souvent, je/on m'interroge sur les avantages de ce choix. Je vais donc essayer de faire le tour des  situations dans lesquelles il y a avantage à utiliser cette fonctionnalité.