If you work with Data Guard, the lag between the primary and standby database is an informative but difficult metric to measure. I’ve encountered some “solutions” that use the COMPLETION_TIME in (G)V$ARCHIVED_LOG for the standby destination as the time of…

A customer recently asked us to identify tablespaces that most contributed to sudden space consumption on ASM. It’s easy enough to find what’s using the most space, but finding what’s been growing is a little less straightforward. Fortunately, Oracle keeps…

Continuent Tungsten is one of the few all-in-one solutions for MySQL high availability. In this post I will show you how to automate the upgrade process using Ansible. I will walk you through the individual tasks and, finally, give you…

Pythian has always been serious about reducing human mistakes. Our consultants have always been required to log all terminal outputs for the work we execute so that the information is available to our clients, and to make sure the same…

Nice topic, right? Beautiful thing to work with when you have Oracle Engineered Systems. So, why would you configure a listener over the InfiniBand Network? How does that make sense in your environment and how would you leverage that? Background…

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…