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.
By the end of the last post we finally got the first OpenStack service up and running: Keystone, the Identity Service. Going back to the list of services we need at a minimum, this still leaves us with some more to setup: In this post we’ll setup the Image Service (Glance) and the Placement service. The Glance service is responsible…
By the end of the last post, we finished with preparing the controller and compute node for being ready to deploy the first OpenStack service: Keystone, the Identity Service. Before we dive into the details lets quickly talk about why we need such a service. In an OpenStack setup there needs to be some form of authentication and service discovery.…
During the last years working with customers and teaching them in security topics, I realised that a lot of DBAs are not familiar with or aware of the differences between the two “owner” existing in SQL Server. That’s why I decided to write a blog about it. Well, in SQL Server we are dealing with two principals in terms of…
In the introduction post we’ve briefly looked at some options you have available when you want to build your own private cloud. In this post we’re going to start our journey into OpenStack by preparing the two nodes we’re going to use for this setup: The controller node, and one compute node. Maybe you remember from the last post, this…
Terraform is a strong open-source declarative and platform agnostic infrastructure as code (IaC) tool developed by HashiCorp. It facilitates the deployment and whole management of infrastructure. In this hands on blog I will show you how you can use Terraform to automate your cloud deployments in Azure. Initial Setup: For this blog I’m using a ubuntu server as a automation…
While public clouds are a trend since several years now, some companies are also looking into self hosted solutions to build a private cloud. Some do this because of costs, others do this because they don’t want to be dependent on one ore multiple public cloud providers, others do it because they want to keep their data locally. There are…
Introduction Oracle Database Appliance X10 is not so old, but X11 is already out, available to order. Let’s find out what’s new for this 2025 series. What is an Oracle Database Appliance? ODA, or Oracle Database Appliance, is an engineered system from Oracle. Basically, it’s an x86-64 server with a dedicated software distribution including Linux, Oracle Grid Infrastructure (GI) including…
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 can be started in parallel by the autovacuum launcher process. By default, this is set to 3, which means that a maximum of three…
The database Capture/Replay feature of the Real Application Testing (RAT) suite enables you to capture the workload from a production database and replay it on a test or development environment. This allows for realistic testing of database changes, such as upgrades, patches, or hardware migrations. In this blog, we’ll explore how to accomplish this when both your production and test…
Over the years, ORMs have industrialized query generation, allowing developers to focus on optimizing the few queries that truly need it. However, they can sometimes produce overly complex SQL with excessive joins and business logic, making tuning a nightmare. It is sometimes hard to know when you should split a query in multiple smaller parts. The complexity is amplified with…
A few days ago a customer called me to ask if I could help him with a problem with the log file. He tried to shrink it, but the system wasn’t doing anything and he didn’t know why. With the column ‘log_reuse_wait_desc’ you can find it out. When I asked him what was in the ‘log_reuse_wait_desc’ column for the database, there…
I blogged in the past about running an Oracle database for testing purposes on Apple Silicon. Initially with emulated Intel code here and then (when Oracle released its 19c database software for ARM) with UTM as a wrapper for the QEMU hypervisor here. In the meantime another possibility came up since Oracle released its type II hypervisor Virtualbox for ARM…
