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.

PostgreSQL extensions provide great functionality for users, but they are difficult to provide securely. Aiven has an open source solution to this problem!

Today’s blog post will give an insight into one of the many things that improved with Icinga DB: how host and service history is written to the database, both by the old IDO feature, as well as what has changed with Icinga DB and how this leads to more reliable results.

One of my favorite consulting questions to ask when dealing with a scalability problem is, “If you could change the system design with the knowledge you have today, what would/wouldn’t you change and why?” Sometimes it’s best to ask this question on a one-on-one basis with different developers, DBAs, report writers, and architects to get honest answers that aren’t intimidated by the other people sitting in a meeting or to avoid potential debating and arguing over a solution.

At the end of 2021, we published a blog post about the Autumn budget in the UK, what it meant for IT teams in the NHS, and why data management should be prioritised. We looked specifically at four key areas for sharing, monitoring, protecting, and accessing data that we believe are crucial elements of the digital transformation journey. Digital transformation is part of the NHS Long Term Plan, a wide-ranging programme to upgrade technology and digitally-enabled care across the NHS.

This is the fifth part in the DevOps 101 series and it’s time to talk about automation. Before we get into it, I just want to recap what DevOps is. Microsoft’s Donovan Brown sums it up nicely in a single sentence: DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users. The important thing to remember here is the order in which he talks: people, process, and products. That’s the way DevOps works.

The demand for cloud services is rising. Databases have been popular tools for a long time. However, the landscape is changing, with cloud databases becoming increasingly popular.

MongoDB is one of the most popular NoSQL databases in the world, used by millions of developers to store application metrics from e-commerce transactions to user logins. The MongoDB Enterprise plugin for Grafana — which is available for users with a Grafana Cloud account or with a Grafana Enterprise license — unlocks all of the data stored in MongoDB as well as diagnostic metrics for monitoring MongoDB itself for visualization, exploration, and alerting.

The enterprise data warehouse (EDW) provides access to business data stored in a denormalized structure called a star schema, which makes it easy to analyze, visualize, and forecast essential business metrics. Business intelligence (BI) reporting makes use of the data warehouse for real-time self-service dashboards, custom visualizations, data marts, decision-making reports, and machine learning (ML).