Database Administration & Monitoring

SQL Server 2025 – Backups to secondary replicas of an availability group

Backup operations can increase significantly I/O and even CPU utilization when we use backup compression. To avoid using resources on primary replica, offloading backups to a synchronized or synchronizing replicas seems to be the good solution even if we have(…)

SQL Server 2025 – ZSTD – A new compression algorithm for backups

Introduction SQL Server 2025 introduces a new algorithm for backup compression: ZSTD. As a result, SQL Server 2025 now offers three solutions for backup compression: MS_XPRESS QAT ZSTD In this blog, we will compare MS_XPRESS and ZSTD. Environment To perform(…)

Using dlt to get data from Db2 to PostgreSQL

For a recent project at one of our customers we needed to get data from a Db2 database into PostgreSQL. The first solution we thought of was the foreign data wrapper for Db2. This is usually(…)

SQL Server 2025 – Standard Developer edition

Introduction The arrival of SQL Server 2025 introduces the Standard Developer edition, allowing companies to deploy across all development, quality and testing environments using an edition equivalent to the Standard Edition without having to pay the associated licensing fees. Here(…)

SQLDay 2025 – Wrocław – Sessions

After a packed workshop day, the SQLDay conference officially kicked off on Tuesday with a series of sessions covering cloud, DevOps, Microsoft Fabric, AI, and more. Here is a short overview of the sessions I attended on the first day(…)

SQLDay 2025 – Wrocław – Workshops

I had the chance to attend SQLDay 2025 in Wrocław, one of the largest Microsoft Data Platform conferences in Central Europe. The event gathers a wide range of professionals, from database administrators to data engineers and Power BI developers. The(…)

SQL Server 2025 Public Preview and SSMS 21 now available

This is a short blog post to share that the SQL Server 2025 public preview is now available for download. At the same time, SSMS 21 has also been released and is now generally available. The LinkedIn post by Bob(…)

2025.pgconf.de recap

( note: I am writing this as member of the pgconf.de organization team, and not as a dbi services employee ) After almost half a year of planning and preparation PostgreSQL Conference Germany 2025 finally took(…)

PostgreSQL 18: Support for asynchronous I/O

This is maybe one the biggest steps forward for PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL 18 will come with support for asynchronous I/O. Traditionally PostgreSQL relies on the operating system to hide the latency of writing to disk, which is done synchronously and can(…)

PostgreSQL 18: Add function to report backend memory contexts

Another great feature was committed for PostgreSQL 18 if you are interested how memory is used by a backend process. While you can take a look at the memory contexts for your current session since PostgreSQL 14, there was no(…)