Stateful, commonly monolithic, and absolutely fundamental to system design, the quality of your database administration and operation is a key determinant of your overall success. Databases are the cornerstone of modern architecture, requiring constant effort, investigation, and iteration to get the most out of a database. This makes it all the more terrifying when an outage occurs.

Over the past two to three years, I’ve seen customers make a move towards both MySQL and PostgreSQL. There is no software licensing with either of these database systems, which can benefit companies, and developers love the community support for them.

Database performance is critical to business revenue. Slow and non-responsive databases can result in hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in lost revenue from poor customer experience and downtime. High expectations in performance require IT infrastructure to function at full speed. In 2006, an Amazon study found that every 100ms in added page load time cost them 1% in sales.

A data warehouse (DW) is a centralized repository of data integrated from multiple systems.. This data is often cleansed and standardized before being loaded. Designed to support analytical workloads, a data warehouse can help organizations better leverage both current data and historical data to improve decision-making through the analysis of business processes and outcomes.

Redis is an open-sourced, BSD 3 licensed, highly efficient in-memory data store that can be easily used as a distributed, in-memory key-value store, cache, or message broker. It is known for being extremely fast, reliable, and supporting a wide variety of data structures, making it a very versatile tool widely adopted across the industry. Redis was architectured with speed in mind and is designed in a way that it keeps all the data in memory.

Have you ever dealt with an application workload suddenly increasing and the demand on SQL Server begins to increase exponentially as a result? Maybe you’ve never had one of those “my solution to X problem just went viral, and everybody’s signing up” moments, but inevitably, at some point in your career, you’ll have to deal with a scalability limitation affecting performance and the business will look to you for a solution.

Open-source software (OSS) relational database management systems (RDBMSes) are becoming incredibly popular in the cloud computing world. In this article, I’ll discuss one of the most popular OSS relational databases, PostgreSQL, and the options you have for this database in the Microsoft Azure cloud. It’s worth noting these products are large with many detailed aspects, so consider this article a cursory, high-level overview of each offering.

Open-source software (OSS) relational database management systems (RDBMSes) are becoming incredibly popular in the cloud computing world. In this article, I’ll discuss one of the most popular OSS relational databases, PostgreSQL, and the options you have for this database in the Microsoft Azure cloud. It’s worth noting these products are large with many detailed aspects, so consider this article a cursory, high-level overview of each offering.

As I navigate further into my career, I’m finding the scope of my role has shifted over the years. I thought I’d take some time to help relay the differences I’ve seen between traditional database administrators (DBAs), database reliability engineers (DBREs), and site reliability engineers (SREs). Before I start, I want to get a disclaimer out of the way: some of the comparisons here reflect only what I’ve seen and may not match what you’ve experienced.