Voice of the DBA

Tag: Redgate

Monday Monitor Tips: Customizing Data Retention
One of the biggest challenges with monitoring data is managing the volume over time. Lots of bespoke/home-grown solutions don’t do this well, and some commercial products have a gross approach that might not meet your needs.

Customers constantly ask me about this, so here’s a quick tip on how you can manage data retention in Redgate Monitor.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts.

Checking the Configuration

As with most things in Redgate Monitor, this is a config item. In your Redgate Monitor solution (or on the public demo site), you can find the configuration gear icon in the upper right.

Click this and you get to the settings page. Scroll down to the Preferences area and there is a Data retention settings link. Click that.

You will get to the Data retention settings page (public site), which has a few sections at the top. You will be setting this per Base Monitor, using the drop down at the top.

Scroll below these to the data retention section, which you see at the bottom:

In this section, you see quite a few different sections. I’m showing the trend data below.

There are sections for
- trend data- long term data for understanding how performance and baselines work
- performance troubleshooting data – query, waits, plan, etc. data
Each of these sections is described, along with where the data is displayed. You can see that in the image above.

To the right of these, are the retention settings. I’ve got an image of the first few items. You can see the time for which to retain data and then the current size of that data.

You can set a fairly granular level of retention for data here, broken out by the various data elements we capture.

The choices for retention are shown below, including indefinitely (be careful of this one).

We have this documented, along with what we think are good defaults on this page. For example, we keep top query data for only one week, since this is a lot of data. However, if you want more time, then set it to something that works for you.

Summary

Data management is always a challenge, both in production databases and in our monitoring systems. Redgate Monitor gives you lots of choices, and those can vary by Base Monitor, so if you have a BM in the cloud doing some stuff and one on premise doing other things, you can set separate retention settings. That can be handy, especially when the cost of storing things can vary dramatically.

Watch this over time and adjust settings as needed to keep your system performing optimally.

Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.
June 9, 2025
The Book of Redgate: Ingeniously Simple

Redgate has been known for many useful tools that are easy to use. We’ve tried to do that in all our point tools. We talk about simplicity all the time and when we release something that isn’t simple, lots of people question why.

Perhaps not enough or with enough pushback, but we do talk about simplicity.

One of the pages in the book was devoted to merely expressing ingeniously simple. It’s written in a number of languages.

The goal of ingenious simplicity is to build things that people can use without resorting to complex manuals and example code. SQL Compare is a great example of this. Enter a few database connections and click Compare and you get an easy report. There’s a big Deploy button on top to help you sync your databases.

I think we’ve done a good job of building some simple tools over the years. Perhaps now we’re in a more complex environment, but we are trying to keep things simple and provide clues to help users understand how the tools work.

I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.

June 6, 2025
DevOps Devour Hour Slides

Here are the slides from my talk today at the Redgate NYC Devour Hour: Architecting Zero Downtime Deployments.pptx

The Repo is here: https://github.com/way0utwest/ZeroDowntime

An interesting question on feature toggles: Would you use Extended Properties for a feature toggle flag?

My answer:

I wouldn’t. I find Extended Propeties (and triggers) to be hidden inside databases and I don’t like hidden things. They fall through the cracks, it’s hard to remember they exist, and more. Plus Extended properties aren’t easily programmed.

I would love

alter table add (or update) extended property

and a way to query these

select * from table.properties

Instead we have a messed up sp_add/update property with a very, very unintuitive set of parameters.

May 23, 2025
The Book of Redgate: Do Your Best Work

One of our mission statements in the Book of Redgate says: attempt to do the best work of your life.

I’d like to think that at most points in time, people are trying to go good work. There are always times when you are distracted, ill, new child, etc. However, doing the best work of your life? Do you think you are always doing the “best work” at a new place? Or being the best version of yourself at this current position?

I think I am, and this is a good reminder to strive for being the best you can be at that point in time.

The text alongside this value is: We’d like you to achieve your own greatness and to be all that you can be. We’ll try hard to allow that to happen and we’d like you to try hard too.

That’s comforting and inspiring. I do think we try to allow people to grow and achieve things. It’s a nice environment.

I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.

May 16, 2025