Voice of the DBA

Tag: Redgate

Paid Flyway Advantages–Undo and Check

The Community edition of Flyway has some nice basic features, and it works well for many people. However, it requires you to do a lot of the heavy lifting of building and deploying scripts. There are some advantages of the paid editions, and one of those is the Undo and Baseline script additions in Flyway Desktop, which we’ll look at in this post.

This is part of a series of posts that looks at Flyway and the feature differences between editions.

Flyway Desktop

The GUI for Flyway is Flyway Desktop. This works for all editions, though some features are not visible when you aren’t licensed for them. Here is the GUI we see the Flyway Community. Note there really is only one thing, which is a list of migrations.

This is useful, and it’s certainly nicer than Explorer. Plus, I can see what is run on a particular instance if I add one.

If I look at my Flyway commands, I see this:

This lets me do the basics of what a script runner does. I can follow a simple, happy path with this functionality.

Teams

Flyway Teams is the mid-tier, and this adds a few nice things. In this case, I now see objects changed in the schema, and I get version control. Both valuable tools.

However, for the Flyway functionality, I also get Undo and Baseline, both things that I do often.

The undo is huge, as there are times I need to get rid of something, or fix a script. Hopefully not in production, but definitely in dev and test.

I can also dry run and see the script that will get executed here, something I’ve always wanted to do as a DBA.

Enterprise

The really useful tier is Enterprise. I know it’s pricey, but it also does the things I really need most in a mixed team of different skill levels.

I get the Generate capability, which really automates the things from SQL Compare that hundreds of thousands of you have found valuable.

I also get the Check command, which lets me look for potential problems.

They All Work

All tiers work, but the paid versions save you time and handle more of the work for you. If you have a team of gurus, you might like Community, but if your staff could use some help, think about trying the paid editions.

October 31, 2022
The Redgate 100

The Redgate 100 is a list of 100 people that are influential in the database world in a number of categories.I made the list in a few places, which is pretty cool.

Disclosure: I do work for Redgate as an advocate, and I helped with some discussion of the list and nominations. I didn’t pick the list, vote, or make decisions.

This is a marketing effort, as are many of the “best of” awards and notices you see out there. In many case, those are often paid placement, as I’ve been offered the chance to be on those lists if I paid a fee. I always decline, or at least to date I have.

In this case, Redgate are in the business of database software and tools. We sell them, but we also support a lot of community efforts as well as are constantly researching to better understand what people need and want. Sometimes we build products in those areas, sometimes we just publish research results.

In any case, I thought this was a pretty neat idea and a great list. You can read about the selection process, which doesn’t tell a lot, other than they took some nominations, calculated some score based on what people do in the community.

While Kathi, Grant, and I work for Redgate and are on the list, part of the reason why we work for Redgate is that we do a lot in and for the community. I could say the same for Kendra who used to work for us, and if we’d have done this list before we were hired, I think we’d have been on it anyway.

This doesn’t imply that everyone who is an influential database professional is on the list. With 100 slots, there were decisions and choices, and there are some experts and incredibly valuable community people who didn’t make the list.

Thanks to all of the people who blog, speak, volunteer, and otherwise help drive the database professional industry forward.

It’s an honor, and I hope Redgate continues to do this in the future.

September 9, 2022
Database Search in SQL Monitor

I learned something new recently. I can search in SQL Monitor for a database name, not just a server or instance name.

I tested this over at monitor.red-gate.com recently after a developer mentioned this feature. If you look at the Global Dashboard, there are a lot of machines. You can see 28 instances monitored, but many more databases.

If I were looking for the DatabaseWeekly database, I would need to know which instance this was hosted on. I do know, but someone in our IT support org might not.

However, if they start typing in the search box at the, the instances shrink. This is the top left box that has “Filter by name” in light text. If I type “database”, you can see fewer instances.

If I add the weekly, then you see there is a cluster of two machines that have this database.

If I pick one of these machines, I can see the databases with this name listed.

A handy little feature I knew nothing about.

Give this a try if you have SQL Monitor and save even more time digging into performance issues. If you don’t have SQL Monitor, download an eval today and give it a try.

July 18, 2022
Alert Filtering in SQL Monitor

SQL Monitor has improved a lot over the last couple of years. We have multiple teams building features and addressing issues, and each month when we have a readout of changes, I’m impressed. Since we update the produce every week or two, customers are seeing these enhancements regularly.

Recently I saw a demonstration of the alert filtering improvements and I wanted to share a few thoughts.

Lots of Alerts

If I go to monitor.red-gate.com, there are a lot of alerts raised across our test systems. While each individual card shows the current alerts, there are more behind the scenes. I’ll write about the cards another time, but in this post, let’s just look at the Alerts tab.

You can see in the image there are 24k+ alerts, and they are distributed across a variety of systems. The left side shows the groupings for databases and a count of alerts. The main section of the screen shows lots of alert types listed, the source database, etc.

One thing I like is the use of color and visual cues. Above, most of these alerts are low level, and bordered on the left in blue. A mid level alert is shown here in yellow. This helps me to triage and decide what to do.

Filtering

While I can click on the server groups on the left and limit the views to a group (or a server), there are still a lot of alerts. The Production group shows 291 below.

The sm-dc2 shows 109 itself when selected.

One of the newer filtering options is that I can click the dropdown at the top of the screen for Alert Type and then limit what I see. The default is all alert types.

However, I can uncheck that and pick just one type, like Machine Unreachable.

Now I only see a couple of alerts.

I can also filter by the alert level, tags, a timeframe, alert property, or alert status. All of this let me focus in on specific aspects of what might be wrong with a database. Using Filters is a good way to more quickly determine what might be happening on a database and how frequently I have these issues. From there, I can use my own skills and understanding of the database to determine what might be causing alerts to fire.

If you give SQL Monitor a try, I’m sure you’ll find it valuable for managing and monitoring your estate, helping you to quickly detect and respond to issues. Download an eval today and give it a try.

June 27, 2022