In our Remote DBA practice, we frequently perform comprehensive system reviews for our customers on their database services. Among the things we always check for are non-default settings for the database software. We want to validate that any non-default setting is set that way for a good reason, and that any setting that is default really should … [Read more...]
Determining optimal Amazon S3 transfer parallelism
Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is a robust, inexpensive and highly-available internet data storage service. At Blue Gecko, we occasionally help our customers design and implement S3-based backup strategies. Compared to conventional off site tape vaulting services, the advantages of vaulting database and other backups to S3 are many. … [Read more...]
YPDNGG: You Probably Don’t Need Golden Gate
Before launching into this, I must give due deference to Mogens Nørgaard’s landmark article, You Probably Don’t Need RAC (YPDNR), available here, but originally published Q3 2003 in IOUG Select Journal. Mogens showed that you can be a friend of Oracle without always agreeing with everything they do. At Blue Gecko, many of our remote … [Read more...]
Finding thread IDs and names of SQL Server background threads
In Microsoft SQL Server, session IDs of 50 or less are dedicated background threads. These are analogous to Oracle’s background processes. Suppose you needed to obtain the Windows thread ID of a SQL server background thread. Just try finding out how to do that in the Microsoft documentation or by Googling. I tried, and came up … [Read more...]