Voice of the DBA

Tag: Redgate

  • SQL in the City Summits–Coming to New York, London, and Chicago

    I love New York. Every time I get to travel to the city, I get excited and look forward to the trip. I was able to spend a night in Brooklyn earlier this year, touring a college with my daughter. Now I’m very lucky to get a second trip this year, with Redgate for a SQL in the City Summit.

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    We have 3 live Summit events coming in October to a few cities: New York, London, and Chicago. These are in person events where we have presentations scheduled for customers and potential customers. These are thought provoking talks and interactive workshops, aimed a C-level and senior staff. If you’re got someone in your organization that might be interested, pass this link along: https://www.red-gate.com/hub/events/redgate-events/sqlinthecity-summit/

    We have Redgate speakers and expert guests, including Bob Ward of Microsoft. If you have the chance to go, contact your account rep today and get a code to register. These are paid events, though a limited number of free tickets are available.

    The schedule is:

    This will be a busy month of travel for me, with the PASS Summit coming the week after Chicago. It should be an inspirational and exciting set of events, and I hope to see some of your at one of these Summits.

  • Redgate University is Growing

    There isn’t a degree to be gained, but you can get a lot of information about Redgate products at Redgate University. This is the place to learn how to best use the products. This is a work in progress and we’ve started with a few of the more popular items, but we should grow the list over time.

    I’m in a few of the SQL Monitor classes, helping to teach them. The classes are designed to be short and focused on one topic. If you watch them in order, you’ll get a flow of how to use the product and what features are available.

    This is a great idea to help someone bone up on their tools and learn to get the most out of them. Even if you use some of our products regularly, you might want to skip through the modules and see what we cover. I’m sure there are things for you to learn.

    I think I’m on the hook to record a few later this year, but we’ll see how this goes. These are quick to record, but there is a lot of prep to get material ready.

    If there are things you’d like to see, either within one of the courses up there or in another product, let us know. The email for ideas is: university@red-gate.com

  • Discussing Database DevOps with Gene Kim

    I’m really excited for this webinar. Register today for the Sept 25 webinar  to learn more about the 2018 State of DevOps report.

    I read The Phoenix Project a few years back and I’ve been following Gene Kim as one of the main researchers and advocates of DevOps ever since. I think his work is amazing and I’ve enjoyed watching him present online during conferences and webinars. I never thought I would get the chance to talk one on one, much less host a webinar.

    This year’s State of DevOps report, from DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), sponsored by Google Cloud, is near and dear to my heart. For the first time, there is a section on databases. Redgate helped sponsor the report as well and was able to get Gene Kim to do a webinar to discuss the entire report, but with a focus on databases.

    At least, that’s my focus. I’ll get the chance to ask Gene questions as well, mostly focused on the data aspect of software delivery, which I think is too often left out. Too many software developers are worried about the database and haven’t included it in the their DevOps world. That’s changing, and join me to see how.

    Don’t forget to register and I’ll see you on the 25th.

  • Custom Data Purging in SQL Monitor

    In talking to a customer recently, they were worried about the amount of data kept by SQL Monitor. That’s a fair concern as monitoring a large number of servers can result in lots of data.

    As an aside, data management is one of the reasons that I’d always want to buy a monitoring tool from a vendor. Most people don’t get this right and it’s a pain to deal with. I’d like you to look at SQL Monitor, but if it doesn’t work for you, look at our competitors. More people need monitoring on their systems.

    In any case, this customer wanted to ensure some data was removed, but not other data. Their concern was that things like performance data or storage data might be needed for a long time while alert data or top queries might not. In other words, customized data management is needed.

    I posted the suggestion in the SQL Monitor Slack channel, asking the developers if they were considering it. In about 5-10 minutes, I got this link: https://monitor.red-gate.com/Configuration/Purging

     2018-08-23 12_15_16-Configuration _ Data purging

    Shazam! They’d already done it.

    Actually, they’ve released this to frequent updaters, but in an upcoming release, this will be the default. You’ll be able to customize how long you want to keep each kind of data. Not by machine (yet), but if you need that, let us know.

    SQL Monitor continues to amaze me with their progress. If you want to get an idea of how it works, check out monitor.red-gate.com, our demo site, where we monitor some real servers at Redgate, including the SQLServerCentral database instances.

    And if you want it in your enterprise, download a trial today.