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Database

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.

SQL Server Always On Availability Groups and Database Master Keys: A Hidden Failover Pitfall

I recently came across an interesting case involving a client whose application used SQL Server symmetric keys to encrypt sensitive data. The database was hosted in an Always On Availability Group environment for high-availability and disaster-recovery. The interesting and challenging aspect of this setup is ensuring that the encryption and decryption remains intact after a failover. This challenge originates from… 

GoldenGate NGINX reverse proxy behavior changes

I recently wrote about NGINX reverse proxy reconfiguration after creating or deleting a deployment in GoldenGate. It reminded me that there is an overlooked aspect of the reverse proxy configuration, which is important when trying to automate GoldenGate management with the REST API. In fact, when using a reverse proxy with a single deployment, some endpoints are different from a… 

Data Point Prague 2026

For the first time, I joined some days ago the Data Point Prague . The biggest International Data Conference in Prague. A two-day event dedicated to advancing knowledge in data technologies. Thanks to dbi-services to let me the possibility to attend this event. Thursday, May 28, 2026 The first day was dedicated to pre-conference Workshops. I choose the workshop “Performance… 

GoldenGate 26ai out-of-place patching with the web UI

For some customers, the end of support for GoldenGate 19c in May this year and the migration to Microservices Architecture mean that they have to adapt their patching procedures (if they had any !). Let’s see how to patch a GoldenGate Microservices Architecture out of place efficiently. This guide is designed for GoldenGate 26ai because this version introduces some small… 

GoldenGate: Regenerate NGINX reverse proxy after deployment changes

Configuring an NGINX reverse proxy for GoldenGate is well documented by Oracle, but what is not is the implication of adding or removing deployments. In fact, when modifying your GoldenGate deployments, you will have to reconfigure the NGINX reverse proxy. If you don’t, part of your installation will not be working anymore. This is what will happen in the web… 

Zabbix – Oracle backups monitoring

If your Oracle database is running in ARCHIVELOG mode, monitoring your backups is essential.Without proper backup supervision, the Fast Recovery Area (FRA) can eventually become full, which may block archive log generation and, in the worst case, stop database activity. In this article, we will see how to monitor Oracle backups using Zabbix and the Oracle plugin available with Zabbix… 

Surviving a Patroni failover with logical replication

Your Patroni cluster does exactly what you built it to do. A node dies at 3 a.m., a new primary is elected in a few seconds, the application reconnects, and nobody gets paged. Your HA setup works. And yet, somewhere downstream, your change-data-capture pipeline has just gone quiet. Debezium or Flink CDC was streaming every change out of that database… 

Oracle Database 26ai Client and SQLNET.EXPIRE_TIME

We have been facing one issue at one of our customer where the Oracle Client connections remained opened for days blocking some avaloq JobNetz. We have been doing some tests and we could fortunately find a solution resolving the problem thanks to Oracle Database 26ai supporting now SQLNET.EXPIRE_TIME on the client side. Through this blog, I would like to share… 

Reduce downtime when refreshing your non-production databases using Multitenant

Introduction You probably refresh your non-production Oracle databases with production data from time to time or on a regular basis. Without Multitenant, the most common procedure to do this refresh is a DUPLICATE FROM BACKUP with RMAN. The drawback is the unavailability of the database being refreshed during the DUPLICATE. You first need to remove the old version of the… 

OGG-08502 Path not found error from OGG Receiver Service

Update: this bug seems to be corrected with the latest GoldenGate patch (23.26.2.0.1). If you face this error, try to patch your GoldenGate deployments. Recently, after a successful migration to GoldenGate 26ai, a customer complained that he was seeing a lot of the following error in the ggserr.log file of a GoldenGate deployment (I replaced the names for the purpose… 

Install and configure OEM plug-in for GoldenGate

If you are licensed for the GoldenGate Management Pack, using the Enterprise Manager plug-in for GoldenGate improves monitoring and management of your deployments. And after migrating to the Microservices Architecture, you should definitely update your plug-in and rediscover all targets. Let’s see how to do all that here. In this blog, I will use the latest version of the Enterprise… 

Customer case study – automating SQL Server TLS Encryption with Ansible and Certificates (Architecture)

When working with SQL Server environments, securing client connections can become an important requirement, especially when TLS encryption must be implemented using certificates. In this context, a customer asked us to develop an Ansible playbook and role to automate the configuration of TLS for SQL Server. The certificates are generated from the customer PKI and provided as PEM files containing…