Increasingly, organizations need to monitor bigger databases across higher numbers of SQL servers, installed across diverse networks and platforms, including cloud platforms such as Azure. Often, these large estates are still managed by a relatively small team who can struggle to keep up, because their monitoring tools and processes fail to scale. They find that Read more
A characteristic theme of all the current legislation on the responsible curation of data is that there should be a system for continuously monitoring and analyzing database activity, in real-time. This Database Activity Monitoring (DAM) system must detect anyone, inside or outside the organization, accessing or tampering with information in any database-driven applications that handle Read more
Most organizations are finding that the size and number of databases that need to be monitored is increasing, unlike the number of people available to do the work. Now that it is possible for the organization to scale out to cloud-hosted databases, the constraints of the available infrastructure have ceased to govern the growth of Read more
As a DBA responsible for the availability, performance, security and overall health of a set of SQL Servers, you have many plates to keep spinning. You’ll need to respond quickly to avert or resolve query performance and resource contention problems. Each morning as you arrive at your desk, you’ll also need to cast a watchful Read more
If your SQL Server runs out of disk space, and it is running a database for an enterprise’s trading application, then the company can’t take money until the DBA fixes the problem. Even the worry of that ever happening is enough to keep a DBA up at night. No wonder, then, that the recent State Read more
As well as being essential for giving you an overview of the SQL Server installations that you look after, SQL Monitor can also be used in ways that aren’t so immediately obvious. One immediate advantage it has as a monitoring tool is that it isn’t part of any one server, database or application: it is Read more
SQL Monitor provides a full suite of monitoring specific to Azure SQL Database and SQL Elastic Pools. You can therefore use it to monitor all your databases, regardless of whether they are on local physical servers or virtual machines, or in the Azure cloud. Azure SQL Database is just a SQL Server database under the Read more
Sometimes query performance problems sneak into SQL Server after a software release that involves database schema or code changes, and you must hunt down the offending query and tune it. Other times, however, the performance changes for less immediately explicable reasons. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this situation: your system is humming along, and you’ve Read more
We all try hard to plan for data growth and changing workloads, as we build and adapt our SQL Server systems, and to anticipate potential problems. Some issues, however, take a long time to appear. They lay in wait, unnoticed but not dormant, and if they strike without warning, they can cause severe disruption and Read more
I recently wrote a series of article that described four SQL Monitor custom metrics, designed purely to monitor for the signs of intrusion, or other unauthorized database changes. These metrics allow you to implement separate strategies for: Detecting SQL Injection attacks – the metric uses Extended Events to capture errors related to incorrect SQL syntax, Read more
Compliant Database DevOps
