A key finding from Redgate’s recent State of Database Monitoring Survey of over 2,500 IT professionals was that 79% of respondents reported using either a third-party or in-house monitoring tool. It’s notable because it’s an increase of 10 percentage points from the same survey last year – and the satisfaction rate with third-party monitoring tools also saw an increase of 18 percentage points to 86%.

Every year, the Accelerate State of DevOps Report examines the capabilities and practices that drive software delivery, operational, and organizational performance. The 2021 report from the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team at Google Cloud has now been published and provides highlights from seven years of research and data from more than 32,000 professionals worldwide. So what are those highlights? Where should IT teams be focusing their efforts on their journey to DevOps?

You may have read or heard about IDC’s recent Global DataSphere Forecast, 2021-2025, which predicts that global data creation and replication will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23% over the forecast period, leaping to 181 zettabytes in 2025. That’s up from 64.2 zettabytes of data in 2020 which, in turn, is a tenfold increase from the 6.5 zettabytes in 2012.

The world of work has changed dramatically over the last year and, at Redgate, we’ve been reflecting on what this might mean for our business, and the ways that we work together in the future. From 2022 onwards, we’re aiming to offer Redgate staff a flexible-hybrid working model across our global organization.

In the IT team at Redox, I wear two hats: Software Development Manager and DBA. I’m the only DBA in the team, so if anything goes wrong it’s my job to identify and fix it. As you might imagine, this can be challenging when being a DBA isn’t your full-time role. Based in Sydney, Redox is one of the leading chemical and ingredients distributors in the world, with over 350 employees across our locations in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and the US.

These are interesting – and challenging – times to be a Managed Service Provider. When it first published its Managed Services Market Size Forecast, Mordor Intelligence valued the market at US$152 billion in 2020, and predicted it to reach US$274 billion by 2026, a compound annual growth rate of 11.2%. Over a year later, following a pandemic which has changed the way most of us work and which will probably see permanent changes going forward, Mordor is sticking by its prediction.

How do we help Database Administrators (DBAs) embrace DevOps in a way that can be really productive and part of a rich DevOps team that delivers value to customers quickly and continuously? That’s an important question to ask right now because there’s a common view among DBAs that DevOps isn’t for them. They’re responsible for documentation and maintenance and deployments, they have internal customers, and they serve internal requests.

Flyway is an open-source database deployment tool that also includes a paid tier called Teams. Since it’s open-source, you can just download Flyway and run it for free. You’ll get a robust DevOps tool to assist you in deploying your databases just like you deploy your code. It just works. So, why would you even bother to pay for Teams? Actually, there are a number of reasons why people pay for advanced tiers of open-source software in general.

In the latest DBAle podcast episode our hosts, Chris and Chris, tackled what they really mean by cataloging a database and how taking a ‘giraffe’s eye view’ approach to compliance is not enough. That’s because the most common data concerns for managers and execs center around where your sensitive data is, the risk it poses and, if you’re migrating to the cloud, how much sensitive data is being stored on that database or that instance.

It’s never been more critical to protect your data infrastructure against malicious actors, with organizations dealing with an ever-expanding number of increasingly sophisticated attacks. Monitoring solutions represent part of your infrastructure’s attack surface area – they enjoy highly privileged access to the systems they help manage, and store sensitive information about the workloads running on them.