For many businesses, using a Managed Services Provider (MSP) makes sense, particularly when it comes to database management, monitoring and security. They can control costs while still having access to expert resources, and dial up or down the service as required. It’s perhaps no surprise then that 47% of people surveyed in the Channel Futures 2020 MSP 501 Report identified professional services as a growth area, 51% identified enhanced network monitoring, and 85% identified security services.

This question comes up all the time: How do you migrate between monitoring systems? The answer is both simple and complicated. In order to understand this better, rather than just rely on my own knowledge, I reached out to a number of people to see how they accomplished this. I’m going to summarize their process for you here in order to help others who may find themselves in need of this information.

This year we’ve been expanding SQL Monitor’s capabilities around the theme of Estate Management and we’ve just released a new capability – the discovery of on-premises SQL Servers and instances. We started on this journey with basic instance configuration observability and alerting earlier this year. While gathering feedback and finding ways to improve our new configuration features, we worked on and released an Instance Discovery Tool as a preview feature.

A new case study shows how Desjardins uses Flyway Teams to standardize the way migration scripts are created and versioned across its multi-database estate, which includes Oracle, SQL Server and PostgreSQL. With assets of over $350 billion and seven million members and clients, Desjardins is the leading financial cooperative in North America.

Redgate recently published the 2021 State of Database DevOps report which, for the last five years, has followed the rise in DevOps and the challenges organizations face when adopting it for both application and database development. Based on a survey of thousands of IT professionals from around the world, it also provides the opportunity to dive a little deeper into how those challenges vary sector by sector.

I’m a Data Architect and I’ve been working with data and databases for years at companies like LA Fitness, Dell and now Kingston Technology in Fountain Valley, California. Over all of that time, I’ve used SQL Monitor. I loved it from the beginning and the latest updates to the global overview dashboard and other features have stepped it up another few notches.

Last year was a year of unprecedented challenges for everyone in every part of the world and every industry, and it was also a year of big changes in the IT sector. The pandemic underscored the role of the IT department as an enabler and a critical part of the transition to remote working. While digitalization was well underway before 2020, no one could have predicted the acceleration the pandemic brought on.

As part of our research for the 2021 State of Database DevOps report, we asked 3,000+ recipients what they consider to be the greatest challenge when integrating database changes into a DevOps process. According to the respondents, these are the most important challenges facing database professionals when introducing DevOps practices to database development.

For good or for ill, technology is constantly shifting and with it, the roles of those who manage that technology also shift. This is no different for a DBA than it is for a developer, an admin, or analyst. As new technology, like the adoption of the cloud, changes the role, people start to question whether or not there’s even a need for a DBA. The shortest possible answer to that question, in my opinion, is “Yes”.

I work as Director at ThoughtWorks in the database and DevOps space. I’ve been here for 20+ years and I vaguely remember my first project at ThoughtWorks in 1999 when we had just started using Agile software development practices. The basic challenge we faced was how to move database changes at the same pace as application code and keep them in sync so that deployments would work. At the time, we had to invent all the tools, processes, and techniques that we needed.