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.
While upgrading GoldenGate to 26ai for a DB2 z/OS source, I had to update the IBM Data Server Driver for ODBC and CLI (CLI Driver, in short) alongside it. Since I realized that DB2 driver know-how was rare in companies, I figured it would be worth writing a blog about the topic. In this GoldenGate upgrade, the previous driver was…
When the cloud admin is the threat: how SQL Server and MongoDB let you query encrypted data, and what each approach costs.
During a healthcheck at a client’s site, we collected performance data from a SQL Server 2019 Enterprise instance hosting a BI / data warehouse workload. Two lines in the wait statistics report immediately caught the eye: hundreds of hours of parallelism waits accumulated in only 11 days of uptime. Here are the questions that arise The waits themselves were not…
While working on a client’s GoldenGate 26ai environment, I ran into a NFS-related replication issue that could have been serious, had it happened in production. Here is what happened and how the issue was fixed. The client’s GoldenGate extract was running on a dedicated server, capturing changes from an Oracle 19c source database. Trail files were written on an NFS.…
How many times have I found, during a migration, that I also have to clean up the databases no more used?Why keep them for so long if we’re not going to use them? This is something we often see among our customers. If we assume that we carry out a migration project roughly every five years, this means we’re keeping…
Since version 7.0.11, MongoDB natively supports OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication. This move was part of MongoDB’s cloud strategy, since cloud environments use OIDC a lot for authentication and authorization. In version 8.0, MongoDB deprecated LDAP authentication and authorization, making it clear that OIDC is the future for MongoDB authentication. In this blog, I will present how to set up OIDC…
When downloading Release Update 23.26.3., I could see this: As you can see in the Product info it also has “Oracle Server – Standard Edition”. However, I haven’t found anything official yet. I tried it and could install 23.26.3. as a Standard Edition ORACLE_HOME: After running the root-scripts I created a Database and verified that it is really a Standard…
In the blog series I previously wrote, I did not answer all the customer’s questions. The last one was the following: Can this also be applied to PostgreSQL? In short, yes, it is possible. Let’s see how. Here is the list of the previous blog posts: Partitioning and filesystem We will reuse the sqlpool ZFS pool created in the first…
This Monday morning, we begin our SLA Support with a customer call.He cannot do a select on a table in his database… After creating the Ticket, I connect to the instance and see that the msdb system database is in a Suspect State: After taking a deep breath because I don’t see that every day, I begin my investigation by…
The 23.26.3.0.0 release update of GoldenGate 26ai (July 2026) ships a small but welcome usability change, listed in the New Enhancements section of the release notes: Bug 39415027: Generic – Simplified Distribution and Receiver Service Path Configuration Enhanced the Create Distribution and Receiver Service Paths experience by introducing Simple and Advanced configuration modes. The simplified view displays only the required settings by default, while…
On an Oracle Linux 8, I installed a new package and did not pay attention that dnf used an old Oracle Linux 7 repository. Trying to remove it again, I was getting following error: Error:Problem: The operation would result in removing the following protected packages: systemd(try to add ‘–skip-broken’ to skip uninstallable packages or ‘–nobest’ to use not only best…
I have been recently facing following error when using yum/dnf: There are unfinished DB8actions remaining. You might consider running yum-complete-DB8action, or “yum-complete-DB8action –cleanup-only” and “yum history redo last”, first to finish them. If those don’t work you’ll have to try removing/installing packages by hand (maybe package-cleanup can help). And I was wondering how to deal with this. I would like…
