Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Schools and local municipalities have always been vulnerable to cyberattacks, but in recent years, especially since the pandemic's beginning, they have been increasingly more prone to threats. According to a statement by DHS, ransomware attacks " crippled state and local agencies in 2020," calling for a State and Local Cybersecurity Improvement Act to set a baseline for new changes with cybersecurity efforts at the state and local level.

As a long-time database consultant, I’ve fixed more blocking problems in database systems than I can count. Often this blocking has resulted from conflicts between processes needing to read rows while those rows are being modified.

The world of IT has gone through a significant amount of change in the last five to 10 years, and the rate of digital transformation can be challenging for organizations of all sizes. Keeping up with new and evolving capabilities alongside an increasingly distributed talent pool can be tough. That’s why it has always been my goal to keep up with the latest trends and provide the best tools for professionals working in the IT trenches. One of those emerging trends is observability.

As more and more money enters the state and local government budgets from pandemic relief funds like The Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) program, the prospect of IT tool sprawl is becoming more prevalent than ever before. While the SLFRF program has presented enormous opportunities for state and local agencies, waste and fraud are almost a given, considering the amount of money being distributed to bolster agency systems.

This article explores the PostgreSQL implementation of the B-Tree (the B stands for Balanced) and hash index data structures. As PostgreSQL grows in popularity as an open-source database system for developers and as a target for migrating from Oracle workloads, understanding how PostgreSQL indexes work is extremely important for database developers and administrators. PostgreSQL has several other types of indexes, such as GIN indexes, GiST indexes, and BRIN indexes.

The SolarWinds® Papertrail™ software as a service (SaaS) Add-On in the DigitalOcean Marketplace is one of the most exciting developments to come out of the DigitalOcean and Papertrail partnership. With the Add-On, developers can seamlessly add the simple yet powerful log management Papertrail is known for to their DigitalOcean infrastructure. In an earlier post, we reviewed how the Add-On helps teams simplify their log management tasks.

The SolarWinds® Papertrail™ software as a service (SaaS) Add-On in the DigitalOcean Marketplace is one of the most exciting developments to come out of the DigitalOcean and Papertrail partnership. With the Add-On, developers can seamlessly add the simple yet powerful log management Papertrail is known for to their DigitalOcean infrastructure In an earlier post, we reviewed how the Add-On helps teams simplify their log management tasks.

“Too many cooks spoil the broth.” It’s an old saying we’ve heard many times in childhood. If we put it in today’s IT monitoring context, we could change it to “too many tools spoil the insights and efficiency.” IT teams across organizations have deployed multiple tools over the decades to monitor and track the performance of networks, databases, and applications and to ensure the smooth running of the business.

In the era of technology defined by cloud computing, features evolve at the blinding speed of continuous deployment. When large software development organizations like Microsoft deliver semi-annual releases of products, like SQL Server, the volume of new features can be so large they can be hard to grasp. Microsoft continues to push the boundaries on what’s possible, both in on-premises and cloud data platforms, and they aim to make the life of data professionals much more manageable.