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.
Introduction In this RAG series we tried so far to introduce new concepts of the RAG workflow each time. This new article is going to introduce also new key concepts at the heart of Retrieval. Adaptive RAG will allow us to talk about measuring the quality of the retrieved data and how we can leverage it to push our optimizations…
As you might know, RO (Read Only) dbhome was introduced in Oracle 18c and became default configuration in Oracle 21c. Oracle came back with RW (Read Write) dbhome as default configuration in 23ai. It might be interesting to know how we can check if the oracle dbhome is RO (Read Only) or RW (Read Write). I had to recently look…
In some of my previous blogs, I showed how we were migrating on-premise databases to the ExaCC using Oracle ZDM at one of our customer. I also explained in some article how it was important in some case to relocate the PDB in a final CDB. Relocating a PDB on ExaCC is usually done using dbaascli pdb relocate command. The…
Contrary to other DBMS, MongoDB self-managed deployments generate logs in a JSON format, which can be quite intimidating at first. But instead of hoping to never have to look at the logs, you can use some tools and tips to navigate them more easily and not waste time finding the information you’re looking for. Log format overview Inside /var/log/mongodb/mongod.log (or…
In this post, we continue our AI journey with SQL Server 2025 (Preview). In previous articles, I already showed how to call the GPT-4o chat-completion model in Azure directly from SQL Server to generate product descriptions, how to create and store embeddings for semantic search, and how to use the (preview) acceleration features for semantic search workloads. If you want…
In the last post we’ve learned the basics for migrating a sample procedure from PL/SQL to PL/pgSQL. In this post we’ll actually start with migrating the code. The first step in the original procedure was to iterate over the foreign key constraints of the user’s tables and to disable them: If you try this as it is in PL/pgSQL this…
Introduction In the first part of this RAG series, we established the fundamentals of Naive RAG with dense vector embeddings on PostgreSQL using pgvector. That foundation works well for conceptual queries, but production systems quickly reveal a limitation: pure semantic search misses exact matches like you would have with like or Full-text searches. When someone searches for “PostgreSQL 17 performance…
Migrating from one database system to another is not an easy task. It might be easy if you only need to migrate the data, but as soon as you have business logic in the database this can become a lot work quite fast. When you want to migrate from Oracle to PostgreSQL this means rewriting all your PL/SQL code into…
By one of our Customers, I have to use Qualys to patch their production SQL Server instances. And to be more precise the Qualys Patch Management application which provides a solution to manage vulnerabilities and deploy patches to secure and keep assets up-to-date.I will use the job functionality of Qualys Patch Management to automate the patching based on a specific…
Introduction Since my last series on pgvector I had quite a fun time to work on RAG workflows on pgvector and learned some valuable lessons and decided to share some of it in a blog post series on the matter. We will discover together where all RAG best practices are landing for the past 2 years and how can as…
Introduction “Make it simple.” When you have to create a solution, design an architecture, you should always take the simplest path, this is often the better solution proven by field knowledge and experiences of not scalable patterns. Which means also that you should only add the necessary and required complexity to your solutions. So while following this principle I tried…
