Database Administration & Monitoring

An introduction to Azure Database watcher

Azure Database watcher is a managed monitoring service designed to provide insights and diagnostics for Azure databases and Azure Managed Instance. It helps database administrators and developers track performance, detect anomalies and troubleshoot issues efficiently. By collecting telemetry data, logs(…)

Cleanup Oracle After Patching

cleanup Oracle-Home(s) after applying the quarterly Release Updates Do you suffer from the fact that release updates take longer each time?Are you afraid that your hard disk will fill up because the Oracle-Home is getting bigger and bigger?Here is the(…)

PostgreSQL 18: Virtual generated columns

This is about another feature which was committed for PostgreSQL 18: Virtual generated columns. Generated columns are available already, but they need to be “STORED”. This means the result of an expression is stored to disk and the result is(…)

Customer case study – SQL Server table partitioning

A client submitted the following issues : Their database hosts multiple tables, including one table of approximately 1 TB, consisting of several billion rows. This table is continuously fed by various data sources. Additionally, it is also used to generate(…)

PostgreSQL 18: Introduce autovacuum_vacuum_max_threshold

Vacuum/Autovacuum is one of the critical parts of every PostgreSQL installation. When autovacuum is not configured properly for your workload you’ll suffer from bloat and performance issues sooner or later. Most of the installations we’ve seen run with(…)

SQL Server AlwaysOn – Failover does not work but everything is green on the cluster

Recently I was called by a customer because the failover on a SQL server AlwaysOn 2 nodes cluster does not work. I connect to the first node of AlwaysOn cluster who is the primary and check the cluster with the(…)

PostgreSQL: Indexes and casting

This is a small reminder to be careful with casting one data type to another in your queries when you want to have an index access rather than a sequential scan. Here is a small example of what can happen:(…)

PostgreSQL 18: Per-relation cumulative statistics for [auto]vacuum and [auto]analyze

This is about another feature which will most likely show up in PostgreSQL 18 later this year. The statistic system is something which gets more and more details with almost every release of PostgreSQL, and PostgreSQL 18 will be no(…)

PostgreSQL 18: Add OLD/NEW support to RETURNING in DML queries

While doing some research on OpenStack (see here for the introduction post), I thought blogging about a new feature for the next version of PostgreSQL might free my head a bit from(…)

PostgreSQL 18: Change the maximum number of autovacuum workers on the fly

For PostgreSQL it is critical, that autovacuum is able to keep up with the changes to the instance. One of the parameters you can adapt for this is autovacuum_max_workers. This parameter controls how many worker process(…)