Tag: syndicated

  • A New Word: Hiddled

    hiddled – adj.  feeling of loneliness of having to keep a secret to yourself.

    I don’t know I am often hiddled. I don’t tend to keep secrets by myself. Often I do share with my wife, because it’s important to me to unload on someone, discuss something, or make them aware. That last one seems to be more important as I age.

    That being said, if I didn’t share a secret, I would feel quite hiddled.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • DevOps Days Minneapolis–Best Practices for Database Deployments

    Thanks to everyone who attended, though with one stage I had a fairly captive audience. I enjoyed the event and look forward to coming back to the Twin Cities in the future.

    A few nice questions, which I’ll address in a few posts:

    • What are feature flags
    • How do feature flags work in SQL?
    • How do we reorder work when we’ve deployed to QA?
    • Is there a way to avoid blame in a retrospective?

    Slides: DevOpsDaysMN_BestPracticesForDatabaseDeployments

    You can also watch the presentation on YouTube:

     

  • Simple Talks–Episode 3

    The third episode of Simple Talks is out. This is the new Redgate podcast from myself, Grant, Ryan, and Louis. The main page is here, and it has links to the audio versions as well as a the video one.

    We recorded Episode 1 and 3 in Cambridge in June. Here’s a short behind the scenes look at the studio in the Redgate office.

    20240606_081928

    We recorded a few more in Austin, which are being edited and scheduled. Look for those to come out in the next few months.

  • Monday Monitor Tips- Enabling Index Tracking in Redgate Monitor

    There is a new index feature in Redgate Monitor, but it’s disabled by default. This post shows how to enable things.

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

    Getting Indexing Information

    If you look on monitor.red-gate.com, inside the details for one of your instances, there is a new Indexing tab. I’ve circled it below.

    2024-07-02 15_00_39-ssc-db-n3_(local) - Server Overview — Mozilla Firefox

    After clicking this, I see the data below for this instance. This shows me a lot of high level information usage on different indexes. The data shows index, then table, then database, but I can search/filter here. I can also sort by the columns, which contain size, updates, seeks, etc. Lots of data.

    2024-07-02 15_03_21-ssc-db-n3_(local) - Server Overview — Mozilla Firefox

    This is disabled by default, as the collection of this data used a lot of memory on the Base Monitor system for some users. Not necessarily something everyone wants, so we left it off.

    You can, however, enable it.

    Enabling Index Data

    There is a doc page for this feature, which I show below. This is a fairly easy procedure, but not everyone knows how to do this, so I’ll explain.

    2024-07-02 15_05_48-Indexes - Redgate Monitor 14 - Product Documentation

    If you look above, in the warning box, it notes how to enable this. From the base monitor, you need to add an environment variable.

    To do this on Windows, the easy thing is search the start menu for “environ”. You should see something like this. Pick the “edit the system environment variables” item at the top.

    2024-07-02 15_08_19-Media Player

    This should bring up the System Properties in Windows (desktop or server). You can also search for environment variables in the Control Panel. Earlier version of Windows let you right click the system and select properties.

    Notice the Environment Variables button at the bottom. We’ll click this.

    2024-07-02 15_08_59-System Properties

    This brings up a dialog that has two sections. We want the bottom, system variables, section. Click the New button at the bottom, below this list of system variables.

    2024-07-02 15_10_42-Environment Variables

    In the dialog, paste this in the variable name: SQLMONITOR_Indexes

    For the value, add “on”. I’m not sure if this is case sensitive, but past in lower case.

    2024-07-02 15_18_52-New System Variable

    Then you need to restart both the base monitor and the web server. This is in the Service Applet, where you can see the Base Monitor and the Web Service.

    Note: depending on versions, you might see this as “SQL Monitor Base Monitor” or “Redgate Monitor Base Monitor”.

    2024-07-02 15_23_01-LiveLabConnection (1) - 3.254.186.109 - Remote Desktop Connection

    Restart both of these services.

    When things come up, you’ll see blanks until some index data can be captured, but be patient and check back in an hour or two.

    Make sure you monitor memory usage on your base monitor machine. If you find yourself running low, you can disable this by setting the system variable to off. Or delete it.

    Or add more RAM. More RAM cures a lot of things.

    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.