Review

You know the drill. Documentation. The underrated and severely underrated baby of automation. "The code is self-explanatory," "Read The Fine Manual" and "We'll do that later". Common comments. Good management is obviously about solid content knowledge. But also do not underestimate the recording of agreements, actions and the clear mapping of the database environment. Read: documentation. In this blog, Harry Splinter outlines a few practical focal points.

In this third and final blog in the series, Gerard Zuidweg, co-owner of OptimaData, discusses the importance of optimizing data modeling to effectively manage and reduce cloud costs. As companies migrate to the cloud, closely monitoring and controlling cloud spend is essential. Gerard shares seven practical techniques for taking a smart look at your data model. That way, you can optimize your database usage and reduce your cloud costs.

In this second blog of a series of three, Gerard Zuidweg, co-owner of OptimaData, discusses optimizing database usage to effectively reduce and control cloud costs. As companies migrate their IT environments to the cloud, cloud expenses can become an ever-increasing expense. Gerard shares six practical tips that will help organizations optimize their cloud costs from a database perspective and even potentially improve application and service performance at the same time.

Migrating business operations to the cloud is a trend that has been going on for some time. The cloud therefore offers the necessary advantages, but also requires a careful approach. In this first blog in a series of three, Gerard Zuidweg, co-owner of OptimaData, discusses the main concerns of cloud migration. He also introduces the concept of FinOps - the merging of Finance and DevOps - and provides five general tips for managing cloud costs, with a focus on database management.

We once attended a demo where a cloud database was deployed. Five minutes and it was there. That makes your mouth drop. Doesn't it? Or does this paint a slightly too simplistic picture of what is involved in the - proper and secure - deployment of a cloud database? In this blog, Mark van der Haar shares a number of points to keep in mind during an Azure SQL deployment.

When companies and organizations have a technical issue, they often look for resources. There is not enough specific knowledge, experience or technical skills in-house to solve the problem themselves. Unfortunately, especially within larger organizations, hiring capacity is seen as a generic HR procurement process. This too often results in the wrong person for the wrong price. In other words, a pedestal without a monkey. In this blog, we try to expose this problem.

We as OptimaData hope that all clients and other relations have been able to conclude 2022 nicely. It is time for a new chapter. In the year behind us, we received many questions about database consulting and were able to give just as much advice and implement solutions. So what were the most important and common issues we discovered and what lessons can you take into the new year?

If you have over thirty years of experience as a DBA, you would think that you have made all the mistakes at least once. But it's very easy to misunderstand, knows Thomas Spoelstra, Senior Database Reliability Engineer and DBA at OptimaData. In this blog, he talks about how missing one word can lead to an awkward situation. And how it can still turn into a success for all parties.

In previous blogs, we described how to select a database support partner and how to prepare your team. Now the real work begins. You've chosen your partner, the QuickScan is done, there are clear agreements about hiring additional expertise, and your team is trained. You can get started. The following three phases can be distinguished.

Ola Hallengrens SQL Server Maintenance Solution is designed by Ola Hallengren, an MCITP database administrator and database developer, who has been working with SQL Server since 2001. The solution is specifically designed to perform maintenance tasks on any Microsoft SQL Server database and consists of backup, integrity check and maintenance of indexes and statistics. In this blog, we tell you what in our opinion are the seven benefits of this solution.

The cloud is popular, very popular. But the cloud does not exist: there are different cloud models – public, private and hybrid – and there are roughly three main types of cloud computing: SaaS, IaaS and PaaS. Part of PaaS is DBaaS. What is DBaaS, what are the pros and cons, and does DBaaS make a DBA obsolete? We give you the answers in this blog.

A common complaint from DBAs is that they are very busy with everyday business, processing tickets and putting out fires. They find little time for optimization, self-development and innovation. On the other hand, a common complaint about DBAs is that they lean back and are not in the ‘cooperative mode’. Could one have something to do with the other? How do you overcome this?

If a red light on your dashboard turns on, most people call the garage - or the roadside assistance - with lightning speed. But if an application suddenly slows down, few people are inclined to do anything about it. That’s a missed opportunity. In this blog Martijn Wallet explains the benefits of having your database regularly serviced.

Our partner EDB helps organizations to get the most out of PostgreSQL. Joost Wasser, Public Sector Account Executive at EDB, and his colleague Aret Aprahamian, Partner Account Executive Benelux, DACH and Nordics, talk about working with OptimaData.

UpCloud is an European cloud provider based in Finland that focuses on companies that need reliable, fast cloud services. In addition to cloud servers, UpCloud also provides other services, such as object storage and managed databases for MySQL and PostgreSQL environments. Because UpCloud and OptimaData have joined forces, UpCloud can now also offer custom solutions to customers with complex database issues. Jasper Jonk, Business Development Manager, talks about the added value of our partnership in this blog.

Craig is an experienced DBA consultant with years of experience in large experimental environments with complex hybrid designs. In fact not very different from what he did as a civil engineer, he thinks. In this blog, Craig tells Femke more about his work and about his special passion for medieval swordsmanship. He also makes the link between creating a future-proof database and flying an airplane.

What has always surprised Gerard Zuidweg, Managing Partner at OptimaData, is that the profession of database administrator is often somewhat undervalued. And that while a well-organized database is crucial to any IT solution. It may not be the sexiest profession in the world, but it is one that should be cherished. In this blog, Gerard explains why.

For the past six months, Thomas Brinkman has been conducting a research assignment at OptimaData. During the assignment, he investigated how a company like OptimaData can deal with the development around databases in the cloud and how they can function efficiently. What are his conclusions?

IT develops at the speed of light. Innovations and updates follow each other in rapid succession and one new tooling is presented after another. There is also a lot of movement in the field of open source databases. Staying abreast of all these developments is therefore quite a challenge. In this blog we will give you some tips and valuable resources.

Copying data seems to have become almost a daily requirement. And, I'll admit it, when asked to automate this, I'm happy to work with you. Automating data and database copies to exits for development, test and acceptance environments is a daily occurrence and often has a valid business case. The simplicity and power of an automated procedure immediately presents a major pitfall. Storage is expensive, especially flash storage in an enterprise computing environment, such as HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI). Our data usage keeps growing and sometimes seems to become unmanageable. In this blog Tino Dudink, DBA Consultant and Senior Database Reliability Engineer, talks about his vision on data usage.

Performance tuning is a much-discussed topic. In many cases it is the first issue brought up by new customers. The question or complaint is usually about the speed of the database. It would be a logical step to take action. In order to achieve visible improvement ad hoc and on a short-term basis, expanding resources is often seen as the solution. And, with databases in the cloud and auto-scale, or “fully managed”, these resources are scaled up for you entirely automatically. The only thing that is not managed are the costs. Because that is, after all, the revenue model of today's popular DBaaS solutions. All the more reason to take a pro-active look at database performance.

PostgreSQL 13 has been released over a month ago. The most important changes and new features have already been announced in various ways and (online) stages, mostly by well-known contributors or influential Postgres community players. In this blog we take a look at those who have allready mentioned the new features, changes and handy facts about PostgreSQL 13. We give an overview of interesting articles, webinars and blogs about the important major but also perhaps neglected non-major changes.

There is a growing interest in Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS). At the same time we only seem to be at the forefront with regard to quality and possibilities. Countless variations are now available from different cloud providers. Databases can be deployed in the cloud with seeming simplicity. If you believe the marketing stories, you no longer need a database administrator. Developers with ready-to-use building blocks - containers - can get started right away. But did they really take a good look at DBaaS?

Lately we've been writing regularly about cloud solutions and points of consideration of different variants of cloud solutions lately. But what exactly is the difference between all those variants? With which form are you the most carefree and with which model do you mainly have control over the performance? Can you still see the wood for the trees?

In this blog, Edco Wallet shares a summary of the Cloud Report 2020, in which the three best-known cloud providers are compared by CockroachLabs. Which one is the best?

The transition to the cloud is in full swing. Private, public, hybrid, IaaS, PaaS, DbaaS; the cloud has countless forms and applications. But which cloud provider and which machines match best with your environment, and especially with your database? CockroachLabs - the company behind CockroachDB - recently published their annual Cloud Report. They have conducted an extensive and thorough benchmark with the three most well-known cloud providers: AWS, Azure and GCP. The benchmark is about a database instance on a cloud server and not DbaaS. In this blog Edco Wallet shares a summary of the Cloud Report 2020.

I ran into the challenge to determine the best partitioning key on an Amazon RDS Postgres database. Normal approach would be to start a project trying to implement this on a development environment. But in most cases, like during a QuickScan, the customer expects an educated guess in as little time as possible. It concerns running production environments where you would rather not release all kinds of scripts and analysis tooling to avoid disrupting the primary process. Which then also takes up unnecessary extra time.

Thomas Spoelstra, senior database administrator at OptimaData, looks back on almost two months of home working from his man cave. About virtual office doors, webcams still on, nice beer packages and wishes for the future.

Because of the coronavirus, we're all working remotely all of a sudden. In order to be able to work remotely there are sufficient tools available. But to work well and enjoyably from a distance and to really make contact with colleagues, employees and customers, some extra attention is needed. We are very happy with co-creative entrepreneurship. Pieter Groenendijk, our staffing and recruitment specialist, explains in this blog what we mean by this and why we care about the extra bit of vitamin A (attention).

My first experience of a Postgres day, where people talk postgreSQL all day. My day started very early – I left home at 05:15 and arrived in Brussels at 09:10. Unfortunately, due to the train schedules (where trains seem to wake up later than I do) I arrived a bit late for the opening talk by Magnus Hagander. Magnus is one of the core members of the PostgreSQL infrastructure team, developer and comitter in the Global development group. And then, straight into the sessions in a packed room, fortunately there was a seat available.

In my previous blog post, I quickly ran through how to set up PostgreSQL inside a Docker container, up to the point where you could administer the database with psql or pgAdmin. What I didn’t do was explain how any of it worked. If you’re trying to anything even slightly different, or if you encounter errors running it as I outlined, then you’re going to need to know what all of those commands actually do.  In this blogpost I will explain some Docker basics.

Each year there a new version of PostgreSQL is released. That’s the moment in which many new features and improvements become available for all users. During the last PostgreSQL meetup in Amsterdam, Devrim Gündüz, major contributor and passionate PostgreSQL consultant, explained the upcoming release of PostgreSQL 12. In this blog we list the most important changes in PostgreSQL 12 for everyone who does not closely follows all the commits in Github or who did’nt have the opportunity to visit the PostgreSQL Usergroup NL meetup.

OEM is designed to allow you to administrate large numbers of databases, and it benefits greatly from a consistent and well-thought-out strategy that enables you to apply the same process automatically to groups of servers and databases. If you only have a few Standard Edition databases, then OEM is going to be overkill, and there are better third-party solutions available. But if you have hundreds of Enterprise Edition databases to monitor, backup and patch then it becomes cost effective.

As a partner of MongoDB we have unlimited access to the MongoDB University (on demand). What does unlimited mean in this case? If you don't have this kind of access to the MongoDB university, then you can still do the courses for free, but the only limitation is that you can't do the courses on your own pace. New course subjects will be available on a per week basis. This means that if you've done one course subject, that you have to wait a week for the next subject to become available.

PostgreSQL is an advanced SQL database server, which is available on a wide range of platforms. It has an enviable reputation for performance, stability, and a wide range of advanced features, which have been developed over the course of more than 20 years. With that, PostgreSQL is one of the oldest open source projects in existence, completely free to use, and developed by a very diverse, worldwide community. And best of all, it just works!