We have released two free tools that will help MySQL and PostgreSQL DBAs understand the queries their database servers execute. As you probably know, we have spent nearly 3 years…
Announcing New Free Network Analyzer Tools for MySQL and PostgreSQL
Five Steps to Great Trade Show Demos
Spring is approaching, and with it, the season of sponsorships. For vendors, trade shows offer a unique opportunity to gain valuable insight regarding market needs, engage potential customers, and show…
Temp Tables, Filesorts, UTF8, VARCHAR, and Schema Design in MySQL
The other day we were doing some peer review on a schema change at SolarWinds and the topic of character set, column length, and the potential downsides of using utf8 came…
See Connection Latency with SolarWinds
Recently, one of our customers reached out to us about a problem they were having trouble diagnosing – they noticed that every once in a while, it took their MySQL…
Schemaless Databases Don’t Exist
There’s no such thing as a schemaless database. I know, lots of people want a schemaless database, and lots of companies are promoting their products as schemaless DBMSs. And schemaless…
What Is Com Admin Commands In MySQL?
If you’ve ever looked at the COM_XYZ status counters in MySQL’s SHOW STATUS output, you’ve probably seen Com_admin_commands. It’s not clear what this means, but it can be a major…
Query Digesting and String Quoting Syntax in SQL
One of the interesting challenges in writing a system like SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM) is writing a query digesting algorithm that deals with all of the technology-specific features, bugs,…
Compressed Messages Using Kafka
First things first: A big shout out to the engineers at Shopify who work on Sarama, the Go Client we use for Kafka – they do a great job on…
How Database Performance Monitor Measures Queries
We often get questions about how we measure queries inside MySQL (and now PostgreSQL too). Many of these questions reveal assumptions about the metrics we provide and our methods for…
Distributed and Diverse: The New Reality of Modern Data Persistence
We create applications in an age of simple, powerful, flexible databases that do magic for us. There’s a large variety of modern databases that supply just what’s needed for lots…