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 Nowadays, everyone in IT is well versed in using ChatGPT and other LLM-powered Chat to retrieve information like Google or try to learn something with it. The problem with those models is their accuracy. Current AI models only know what information they have been fed and expose it to you in a format you understand (which is already surprisingly…
Many of our customers enable log_connections because of auditing requirements. This is a simple boolean which is either turned on or off. Once this is enabled and active every new connection to a PostgreSQL database is logged into the PostgreSQL log file. Up to PostgreSQL 17, a typical line in the log file for a logged connection looks like this:…
Yesterday I participated to the Oracle Technology Roundtable for Digital Natives in Zurich. It was a good opportunity to learn more about AI, Cloud and HeatWave with the focus on very trendy features of this product: generative AI, machine learning, vector processing, analytics and transaction processing across data in Data Lake and MySQL databases. It was also great to share…
Recently we faced the following situation and have been asked to analyze the issue: A dump was loaded into a primary instance of PostgreSQL, but the data did not reach the replica. Tables which have been added after the dump was loaded, however made it to the replica. After going through the logs it quickly became clear that the reason…
For the time being Windows PowerShell 5.1 is installed with Windows Server. It means that if you want to use or even test PowerShell 7 you need to install it by your own.To be honest, even if I’m using PowerShell as a DBA more or less every day, I did not take too much care of PowerShell 7 until I…
A very, very long time ago I’ve written a blog about cstore_fdw, which brings columnar storage to PostgreSQL. This is now part of Citus and does not anymore come as a separate extension. While this still can be used there is another option if you’re looking for columnar storage in PostgreSQL, and this is pg_mooncake. The goal of this extension…
Troubleshooting Oracle Data Guard when your standby database has errors or is not in sync
Here is the How To of scripting them instead Oracle Data Pump can import simple programs without arguments, but it fails when handling Scheduler-Programs that contain arguments. This has been a persistent issue with no official resolution. Since this was a critical challenge in a recent project of mine, I’d like to share my solution. In rare cases, the scripts…
After successfully completing several customer projects involving Delphix products, Data Virtualization and Data Masking, I decided to set up a complete infrastructure internally to test the combination of both products. Delphix Data Virtualization Creates only a virtual copy of your database blocks instead of a full physical copy. For example this allows making a new big database available only in…
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 and metrics, Azure Database watcher enables proactive monitoring and alerting, ensuring database health and optimal performance. Moreover, Database watcher is…
During the analysis of the requirements for the challenging yet incredibly exciting project for our customer Galenica, I remember one thing very well: my colleagues from the OMrun-Team, Product Owner and consultant Frank Zeindler and consultant Oliver Schwark were not always very confident of meeting the client’s expectations and goals… But then happened what happened before – they dug into…
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 how-to for cleaning up your environment. A) cleanup – option 1 for Out-Of-Place patching According to Oracle’s recommendations, you did…
