Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Your monitoring console probably covers the switches, the hosts, the VMs and the application traces. The database tier is the gap. It tends to live in a separate tab. Somebody opens that tab once the incident bridge has already started. That gap got more expensive this year. On 21 April 2026, Oracle moved MySQL 8.0 to Sustaining Support. The version most production estates still run no longer gets new fixes. Good MySQL monitoring tools close the gap.

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) has applied to financial organizations across the EU since January 2025 and is designed to strengthen their ability to withstand operational disruption. What the roundtables revealed was that although these financial organizations had completed extensive DORA planning exercises, this groundwork was not reliably translating into auditable operational control.

AI coding assistants have changed how fast application code gets written. Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, and agentic tools built on top of them can generate a working feature in minutes. But none of them know your database's history. They don't know that a migration already renamed that column last sprint, that a policy forbids unqualified DELETE statements, or that the target environment has drifted from what your migrations say it should look like.

At Harness, we build an AI-powered software delivery platform, and test result data is core to how we help engineering teams ship faster. The table that stores it started small: one row per record, all the context right there on the row. Simple, readable, and it worked. Until it didn't. This is the story of how we refactored it, what we learned, and what I'd tell you to watch for in your own systems.

This month, we wanted to spotlight some of the new cloud features that shipped last month and are enabling teams to keep pace with database estates that increasingly span multiple platforms and providers. We also have updates for Monitor Enterprise users that improve alerting for permission changes. Here's what's new in Monitor.

This month is a big one! We announced the latest major release of Redgate Flyway Enterprise, built to help teams move fast with AI without losing control of the database. Three key new capabilities also landed in preview: Flyway’s MCP server, advanced support for Databricks, and Oracle schema existence checks. And we're closing with a short, honest read on failure and what it takes to make deployments less stressful. Here's the round-up.

Versioning reference data in Git with Liquibase OSS changelogs enables consistent, auditable, and automated deployments across environments. Using loadUpdateData with versioned CSV files provides fast, reliable rollbacks and reduces production risk. Modern applications do not just depend on schema changes. They also depend on data that powers the application itself.

"Connection pool exhausted" is one of PostgreSQL's most misleading production errors. The database is often healthy, while your application waits behind full connection pools. In Kubernetes, every pod and replica maintains its own pool, amplifying issues like connection leaks and slow queries across the cluster.

This quarter we’ve been busy investing a lot of effort into improving how users understand and control what they pay for VictoriaMetrics Cloud, and how to move around the console while doing it, with major UX improvements across different sections and functionalities. The big piece of work is transparent credits reporting, giving prepaid customers full visibility into balance, consumption, and expiration.