I’ve been looking into how Vagrant and/or Docker can be used to improve the life of DBAs and maybe others, too. I did this mostly to practice using these tools – especially Docker – that are becoming more and more important…

Indexes increase read performance and allow queries to access data faster. But they also need to be updated when the indexed keys are created or modified, which consumes additional time to complete C*UD operations. In this blog post, we will…

Earlier this year Microsoft released the next generation of its data pipeline product Azure Data Factory. The first release of Data Factory did not receive widespread adoption due to limitations in terms of scheduling, execution triggers and lack of pipeline…

Welcome to Part 5 of the series. First, some background: if you want to skip to the reference part, scroll down. This hint was introduced relatively recently – in Oracle 12.1 – where for the first time, SQL Windowing functions are…

SQL Server is one of the most adopted and widely-used database engines in the world. Almost every company either builds on it or uses some enterprise third-party software that uses it as the back end. For this reason, it makes…

In this blog post, I’ll walk you through setting up encrypted replication on MySQL 5.7 with GTID enabled. I will walk you through how to create sample certificates and keys, and then configure MySQL to only use replication via an…

I was using SLOB to compare the throughput between 12.1 and 12.2 databases, and was surprised to see that the average redo size per transaction was ~18.5KB on 12cR2, and ~339KB on 12cR1. Understanding this difference was important for the…

I recently had the pleasure of discussing CockroachDB on the Datascape Podcast with Chris Presley and I wanted to supplement that episode with a bit more technical information about this database. A Deeper Look at Consensus CockroachDB uses the Raft…

When talking about automation for Oracle Database Administration, besides automation of software installation and patching, with the use of techniques from machine learning, we can also try to automate a few other tasks. This is especially true since it is…

As Microsoft’s premier NoSQL cloud offering, Cosmos DB offers some interesting design decisions and trade-offs that are necessary to understand in order to maximize the benefits of the product. In this blog post, we are going to cover indexing as…