When it comes to disk configuration options for virtualized servers running on VMware, you have two options: VMFS virtual file-based disk (VMDK) or a raw device mapping (RDM). Which one…
VMDK versus RDM: Which One Do I Need for SQL Server?
Multi-Threaded Replication in MySQL
For years, people lamented that MySQL’s replication was single-threaded. Peter, Vadim, and I griped about this in High Performance MySQL for two whole editions, as well as a bunch of…
Performance Schema, Slow Query Log, and TCP Decoding
Peter Zaitsev posted Percona’s answer to the question, “why use the slow query log instead of the PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA tables to gather information about query execution and timing?” At SolarWinds, we…
Hardware or Code? SQL Server Performance Examined
CPUs are running faster now than ever before, solid-state drives are replacing spinning disks, and database servers have terabytes of RAM. Because these resources are plentiful and increasingly affordable, it can seem tempting to solve database performance issues with hardware. But consider this example: if CPU utilization shoots up to 90% on one of your servers and stays at that level for a day or two, is the problem lack of CPU power or something else?
A Tale of Two Memory Leaks in Go
In this post I’ll illustrate two ways I’ve accidentally caused slow but steady memory consumption in Go programs. The phrase “memory leak” isn’t really accurate, but I can’t think of…
How to Recover the Master Database in SQL Server 2012
In my seven years as a production DBA, I can count on one hand the number of times I have need to restore the master database as a result of…
Connect to Windows Azure Virtual Machine Using SSMS
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…
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…