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If you don’t know socat, you probably should. From its man: Socat is a command line based utility that establishes two bidirectional byte streams and transfers data between them. Because the…

Why is a threshold-based alert such a disaster? There are two big reasons. Thresholds are always wrong. They’re worse than a broken clock, which is at least right twice a…

In this post I’ll tell a story that will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever monitored MySQL. Here’s a recipe for a threshold-based alert that will go horribly wrong, beyond…

This post is part of an ongoing series on the best practices for effective and insightful database monitoring. Much of what’s covered in these posts is unintuitive, yet vital to understand. Previous…

I wrote a couple of posts previously on SQL Server consolidation. The first post tried to give insight on some of the problems and associated motivating factors that most companies have…

Consider for a moment that you have a deck attached to your house. It is one story above ground level and is growing weaker with each passing year. The former…

I am seeing more than a handful of articles these days regarding SQL Server virtualization and/or consolidation. Lots of companies are coming forward to provide you tools that will take…

We have customers using database mirroring, so I wanted to take some time to write a quick post regarding database mirroring and performance monitoring. Microsoft has published an article titled…

I never cared for the phrase “wasted time” when it comes to something like performance tuning. Sure, we all feel that way, especially when we spend hours on something only…

Look, everyone makes mistakes. It’s true. But not all of us have the chance to make mistakes that end up costing millions of dollars in hardware and production support costs.…