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Database

Everything our consultants learn while running databases for customers: Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB and Delphix. Expect hands-on posts about installation, day-to-day administration, backup and recovery, performance tuning, replication and upgrades.

SQL Server: Quickly clean backup history with dbatools

I just had to restore a database in production for my customer. Before doing the restore I have the habit to query the msdb.dbo.backupset table to get an overview of the last backups. When running my query, I felt it was taking longer than usual. So out of curiosity, I looked at the SSMS standard report “Disk Usage by Top… 

Oracle disables your multitenant option when you run on EC2

I have installed Oracle 19.6 on an EC2 for our Multitenant Workshop training. And of course, during the workshop we create a lot of PDBs. If you don’t have paid for the Enterprise Edition plus the Multitenant Option you can create at most 3 pluggable database. But with this option you can create up to 252 pluggable databases. Does it… 

PostgreSQL message levels

When you start to write business logic in the database by using triggers or functions/procedures you usually want to report messages to the user that runs your code or you want to include some debugging output for your own. In Oracle a lot of people use the dbms_output package to return simple messages to the user’s screen. In PostgreSQL you… 

SQL Server Tool: MSSQL-CLI

MSSQL-CLI is a useful new command line tool. Not so new because this tool exist since 2018 but a little bit unknow. You find this tool on GitHub here. One of the big advantage is the number of platforms available, Windows of course but also macOS, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOs, Red Hat, OpenSuse, Suse Enterprise and Fedora. This interactive command-line query… 

Can I put my temporary tablespaces on a RAM disk with PostgreSQL?

The short answer to the title of this blog post is: yes, of course you can. The more important question is: should you? The PostgreSQL documentation about tablespaces contains an explicit warning: “Placing a tablespace on a temporary file system like a RAM disk risks the reliability of the entire cluster”. This is for sure true for tablespaces containing persistent… 

AWS Automation – Stop a RDS instance

Introduction I created a RDS SQL Server instance on AWS. I use it for test purpose and to minimize the costs I needed to ensure that my instance is stopped automatically at the end of the working day and also because on RDS instances are automatically activated when its schedule maintenance is triggered. In this article I will share the… 

DynamoDB: adding a Local covering index to reduce the cost

By Franck Pachot . This is a continuation on the previous post on DynamoDB: adding a Global Covering Index to reduce the cost. I have a DynamoDB partitioned on “MyKeyPart”,”MyKeySort” and I have many queries that retrieve a small “MyIndo001” attribute. And less frequent ones needing the large “MyData001” attribute. I have created a Global Secondary Index (GSI) that covers…