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.
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 easy to setup and configure and all you need are the client libraries (for Db2 in this case). But it turned out that db2_fdw…
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 are the different editions available in SQL Server 2025: What problem does this solve? Some companies deploy the Developer edition…
In this blog post I will explain the different types of Oracle wallet with the auto_login feature. What is an Oracle Wallet An Oracle wallet is used to store certificates for Listeners with https protocol, or it can be used as an encrypted password store for Oracle logins. Technically, an Oracle wallet is an encrypted, password-protected PKCS#12 container file (ewallet.p12)…
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 of the main conference. Morning Kick-Off: Sponsors and Opening The day started with a short introduction and a presentation of…
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 first day was fully dedicated to pre-conference workshops. The general sessions are scheduled for the following two days. In this…
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 Ward announcing the news can be found here: Announcing SQL Server 2025 Public Preview In his post you’ll find a…
As PostgreSQL 18 Beta 1 has been released (link) and is packed with lots of cool features like improved IO on reads for example, I wanted to test out the new pg_createsubscriber and pg_upgrade options and how they are going to help us performing smoother major upgrades using the “blue-green” migration similar to the ones available on AWS (Using Amazon…
( 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 place last week in Berlin. It was in the same hotel as the 2022 edition of PostgreSQL Conference Europe and this was a good…
Managing SQL Server trace flags effectively is a common task for DBAs and system engineers, especially when tuning the SQL Server behavior for specific use cases or performance optimizations. While trace flags can be enabled programmatically using T-SQL commands such as DBCC TRACEON, this approach has an inherent limitation: the flags are session-based or global only until the SQL Server…
Sometimes there is no time for a long analysis of a slow query and a fix (workaround) has to be provided asap. In such cases it often helps to check if a query did run faster with a previous OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE-setting. If that is the case, then you also want to find out which optimizer bug fix caused a suboptimal plan…
AI projects are increasing and with it comes some risks that are or not related to this technology. Some organizations are jumping straight into “plug the LLM into a vector database” ( like Pinecone, Qdrant, pgvector…) at the risk of replaying the lift-and-shift mistakes made on the cloud projects. This time, hiding years of data-quality, governance, code, architectural debt behind…
I recently had to install an Oracle Database Appliance X11 HA and it failed when creating the appliance: It happened randomly in the past that we got this error “host key verification failed” and we just had to rerun our “odacli create-appliance” command again. However, this time restarting was not possible: Following MOS Note “ODA Provisioning Fails to Create Appliance…
