Performance matters when writing, too: more SQL tips
SQL is a great domain for attention to performance, because it so often happens “in the wild” that a modestly altered coding boosts performance by an eye-popping factor. It’s exciting to accelerate a query that takes a day to execute, into one that finishes in five seconds. Almost all the written examples of these speed-ups, though, are about queries, in the narrow sense of read-only reports. They have to do with retrieval of data. As it happens, writes to a database also often have great potential for improvement. To understand SQL write performance, start with a little...
read moreMonitoring tools leverage expertise, not replace it
Advanced monitoring tools enhance your value as a skilled devops practitioner; they’re not a threat to replace you. That’s not the impression many executive-level decision-makers have, of course; they truly believe that the next dashboard or console will substitute for expertise, and allow them to staff datacenters with entry-level screen-watchers. From their perspective, “deskilling” is a reasonable expectation for digital products, and many don’t have enough background in software to understand why it doesn’t work that way. Consider a model incident: ...
read moreExpect for DevOps
If you’re in DevOps, you need to know about Expect. If you’re in DevOps, accustomed to working on nitty-gritty back-end details of datacenter configuration, and you want a quick career boost, you truly need to learn a little Expect. Expect is the real “Internet duct tape”. While that label has been applied to everything from a blog to the popular computing language Perl, it’s Expect that fits the metaphor best. Duct tape dominates transient hacks: nearly anything you do with duct tape can be done in a different way better and more permanently. The point is...
read more3 Areas To Consider When Monitoring Applications
This is a blog post by our friends at Heroix, you can read more here: Heroix Blog Recently an article was written on the impact “Application-Aware Network Performance Management”* has on business operations. Organizations that utilize important information technology (IT) resources such as mission critical applications and systems have long known that optimized IT resources mean optimal business productivity. By ensuring the fastest response time and availability of applications, systems and networks an organization will run efficiently from top to bottom. To read the entire...
read moreFour tips for DevOps migrating to the software-defined datacenter: techniques for managing technical debt
Provisioning a new host in five minutes rather than an hour. Licensing for variable loads slashed by a large fraction. Another ’9′ in availability (from 99%, say, to 99.9%). Many of the potentials of a “DevOps” orientation are familiar by now among systems administrators. Not so well known are several of the time-tested techniques programmers have long used to make the most of their software-oriented development efforts, and that also apply to administrative work. It’s not that devops haven’t heard of parametrization, logging, version control, and peer...
read moreQuality matters: invisible lines of code and their all-too-visible real-world impacts
American Airlines (AA) lost tens of millions of dollars in one day recently. ‘Still have trouble communicating to decision-makers that IT (information technology) is a serious matter? Remind them of what happened to AA. It’s not just AA, of course. Technical choices and management that sound like matters purely for specialists end up affecting hundreds of millions of government documents, over a hundred thousand customers of the Royal Bank of Scotland, or millions of users of tech powerhouse Google. AA’s episode on 16 April 2013 resulted in cancellation of what was...
read moreFree Real User Monitoring
This blog is sponsored by Correlsense,
the maker of SharePath RUM Express -
a free tool that provides a real-time
view into the actual experience of
your end-user, including availability,
response times and service levels.
