In 2013, Microsoft made it available for customers to utilize virtual machines running in Windows Azure. This allowed customers to run an on-premises version of SQL Server, but have the…
Connect to Windows Azure Virtual Machine Using SSMS
Multitick: multiple-subscriber time.Ticker in Go
Many of our agent programs have several independent worker routines that all need to be timed on clock ticks, sometimes with a specific time offset. We recently open-sourced multitick, a…
Analysis of PayPal’s Node-vs-Java benchmarks
I was interested in the data shown in PayPal’s blog post on switching from Java to Node.js, for two reasons. First, at a glance both sets of benchmark data looked…
Changing Default Database File Locations in SQL Server
When you create a database in SQL Server and do not specify a file location for your data and log files, SQL Server will rely on the default locations as…
How to write Go packages coders will love
This post was featured in our July 2015 anthology of most popular SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor (DPM) blog posts of all time. One of the patterns I’ve found in the…
5 Things You Didn’t Know About SQL Agent
Microsoft SQL Server comes with a boatload of additional components. One component is the SQL Agent. The purpose of the SQL Agent is to serve as a job scheduler. Many…
What Happens if I Shrink a Database in Windows Azure?
At some point in your career as a data professional, you are going to fill up an entire drive with data. It is not a question of “if,” but a…
Providing Exceptional Customer Service to Exceptional Customers
What is “exceptional” customer service? It’s difficult to define, but you know when you have received it. It is an experience in which a service representative helped change a stressful…
Big-O Notation Made Simple
If you’re a programmer or computer scientist, you’re probably familiar with Big-O notation. It’s part of your foundational understanding of how complex a problem and/or algorithm is. But most explanations…
Improve SQL Server Performance by Looking at Plan Cache (Part 3)
You can use the information in the SQL Server plan cache to research performance issues and investigate opportunities for performance improvement. In this three-part article series, we’ve examined several important…