Virtualization of x86 servers is ubiquitous for obvious reasons. Cost savings, efficiencies in provisioning virtual machines (VMs), recoverability, and the ability to move workloads are a few of them. There are, however, key VM and host metrics and events you should keep an eye on if you suspect your database performance is being impacted by running in a virtual machine. Let's walk through those metrics using VMware ESXi as the basis of the discussion.
Posted August 11, 2020
While Postgresql.org has been around since 1996, its origins go back to the mid-1980s, when Michael Stonebraker, who led the Berkeley team that developed Ingres, started a new project called Postgres to build upon the ideas in Ingres. While most PostgreSQL users rely upon the free and open source implementation, there are several variants.
Posted June 10, 2020
As with everything, there are trade-offs when it comes to indexes. A sign of a good database performance tuning and optimization solution is that it will analyze every query per database instance, look at all the tables used with each query, and then make a recommendation for table tuning if there's a positive impact.
Posted February 10, 2020
Remember when standing up a new database instance involved modeling the application using the underlying database to figure out what hardware (server, storage, etc.) was needed to support the new instance? And, since most organizations did capacity planning on a spreadsheet using linear metrics, there was a lot of estimating involved, thus over-provisioning the hardware was standard procedure.
Posted December 01, 2019