The recent system glitch at Toyota offers a compelling lesson in the intricate dance between technology and business. When routine database maintenance went awry, the fallout was massive, halting 28 assembly lines across 14 plants. Over a span of 36 hours…
The pursuit of historical data and its analysis is a significant part of the functionality that Spotlight on SQL Server users have come to expect and continue to seek improvements upon. In the past, users have expressed the need for ad-hoc query capability…
We all remember Abbott and Costello’s skit “Who’s On First?”. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you pop over to YouTube and give it a watch. It has become one of the legendary classic comedies of all times, with Costello not knowing baseball…
You say “No” - well - I say “Yes”. All database rules are sensitive and have a sensitivity level.
What does that mean? What is a sensitivity level? Where can I find it and can it be modified?
Ok - a lot of questions, so let's start…
DBAs are all kinds of awesome. We’re smart. Stylish. Capable of administering databases! Who else can say that? Yeah. Just DBAs. Our technical wizardry is second to none.
Because we’re awesome.
And guess what today is. It’s our day. That…
During a recent installation of Foglight for SQL/Oracle the DBA announced how excited he was to get Foglight installed because he was desperate to become a pro-active DBA and stop being a re-active one. Music to my ears!
So what was it about Foglight…
There are so many things you never want to hear in life:
But few things are worse…
Now you've successfully configured Toad's Team Coding with your preferred version control system, how does Team Coding actually work? Watch this video to learn how simple the process is and how Team Coding also ensures that the integrity of your database…
I’ve been interested in weather, meteorology and clouds in the sky for as long as I can remember; which may explain why one of my favorite songs is Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”. I’ve learned that some clouds are pretty, and…
In a previous post, I explained how to customize alarms in Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise. Recently, I had a customer inquire how he could refine the "Days Since Last Full Backup" alarm. He wanted to be able to exclude specific databases, but specify…
Understand that this is a general, high-level guide outlining the steps you should expect to take during a Foglight for SQL Server upgrade. Since environments and upgrade circumstances are often different, it is important to review and familiarize yourself…
I had a customer ask how they could use Foglight to find out when "dbcc checkdb" last ran against their SQL Server databases.
This is a great use case for User-Defined Collections!
As a refresher, my colleague Trent Mera wrote a great blog on…
Are you looking for a simpler, more effective way to carry out code quality reviews of all your Oracle PL/SQL code that takes subjectivity out of the equation and gives you the foundation for an automated way to review your code as part of a DevOps process…
Is your organization moving to agile development and DevOps and you now have to test your Oracle PL/SQL code and have no idea what to do? Your worries are over! With Toad for Oracle, creating some simple PL/SQL unit tests to get started is really easy…
If you’re like many DBAs, your life is probably getting more complicated by the week. Are you under pressure to manage larger and larger numbers of database instances? Or to adopt new database technologies like open source or NoSQL? With those changes…
Friends. Change is here. All of us DBAs are dealing with it. Look at the number of new database platforms. It’s relentless. They just keep coming. And we’re expected to take on any or all of them that’ll save our companies money. But it’s hard, right…
Managing production application databases has become more demanding than ever before not only due to the complexity of the applications they support, but also the very small margins for performance slowdowns or outages. Being proactive and resolving…
First and foremost, we always recommend testing our products in a lab environment. Test in production at your own risk. We understand you want to get real data and it makes sense but testing in production comes with risks. Am I saying you should never…
Sometimes authorizing a product can be confusing with the terms that are used.
As with many Quest products, there is a two-step authorization process.
A license key or Authorization key will need to be inputted; along with its Site Message string.
These…
As we continue our navigation of Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise and we can diagnose an alarm that triggers. Let us see what setting caused an alarm to trigger. The fact is when you start monitoring an Instance it is assigned the preset “Factory Settings…
I pulled pricing and mileage data from several car for-sale sites and dropped it in an Excel sheet. Columns include year, price, kilometers (mileage), etc. Here is a snippet of the data…
Just the facts! Part 2
Acknowledging Alarms in Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise
Now that we have establish a view of the facts let’s see what we can do with them. Some on these alarms are set by default to be acknowledged before they will clear for…
When a large customer appreciation company needed to categorize their Oracle auditing data by region, SharePlex came to their rescue. They were already using SharePlex’s Change History feature to track the userid’s, timestamp, before and after data values…
A large educational Institution recently approached us with a problem. Their Student Information and Financial databases were in Oracle, and a data warehouse containing extracts from both of these used for decision making, including opening more sections…
We all tend to spend most of our time on the “turnpike” of a product’s feature set: you know, the “power” set of its features that get us to many of our endpoint destinations within the product as productively as…
