Database Monitoring and Security Go Hand in Hand

A comprehensive strategy for monitoring your database estate should go beyond performance metrics like CPU usage, memory consumption, and IO performance. This article explains a unified approach using Redgate Monitor, which will collect performance and security data side by side across all databases and servers, whether on-premises, cloud-hosted, or both. It highlights security features for monitoring and reviewing the configuration of your database and servers, as well as tracking which users and processes have access to them, and with what permissions. It also explores features for maintaining continuous availability of monitoring data, and enabling custom visualization and reporting based on historical monitoring data. Read more

Finding Significant Differences in Flyway SQL Migration Code

This article demonstrates using PowerShell-based tokenization to compare two SQL migration files. It ignores non-functional changes like comments or formatting and pinpoints the first meaningful change in SQL logic, providing detailed feedback on its location and nature. Read more

Monitoring Database Security and Compliance alongside Performance

Managing database security, compliance, and performance across a complex estate is no easy task. Redgate Monitor Enterprise brings all the data you need into one place. This article explores how it helps DBAs track user permissions, ensure configuration compliance, create custom reports, and implement resilient high-availability monitoring. Read more

Defusing Flyway Validation Errors using Smarter Checksum Comparisons

This article provides a scripted SQL tokenizer script that quickly verifies whether a Flyway validation error is a real cause for concern, due to retrospective metadata changes, or just the result of a developer valiantly adding formatting and documentation to improve the code. If the changes are purely cosmetic, we can safely run Flyway repair to resume normal migrations. Read more

Simplifying Data Import and Export for Database Development

Extracting and importing data for development and testing is made trickier due to issues such as constraints, dependencies, and special data types. This article introduces a cross-RDBMS solution with JSON for data storage and PowerShell cmdlets that use ODBC to help automate extraction and import, and JSON Schema for validation. Just provide a DSN, and you’re good to go! Read more

Understanding PostgreSQL’s Cache Hit Ratio

This article explores PostgreSQL's buffer cache hit ratio (BCHR), a metric tracked by Redgate Monitor to help you assess the health and performance of your databases. By correctly interpreting this ratio and using it with other relevant memory and IO metrics, you can identify potential bottlenecks in query execution before they impact users. Read more

Making Full Use of Environment Variables for Flyway Settings

Environment Variables make interactive use of Flyway much easier, and they are essential when developing callback scripts. This article explains the range of configuration details you can provide and how, and demos a PowerShell script to auto-convert the parameter values stored in Flyway .conf files into environment variables. Read more

Better Database Incident Management with Redgate Monitor

This article demonstrates how Redgate Monitor helps teams manage database incidents efficiently, by providing the right data to the right people, at each stage of a tiered incident response system. With fewer distractions from routine issues, specialist staff can focus on core tasks while teams resolve problems faster and prevent future disruptions. Read more

Deterministic Data Masking in Redgate Test Data Manager

Redgate Test Data Manager is designed to provide secure, anonymized, and representative copies of production databases. This article focuses on the role of deterministic data masking, transforming PII consistently across tables, even when no logical relationship exists between them, and explains how it works. Read more

Installing and Upgrading the Flyway CLI

This article demonstrates three ways to install and maintain the Flyway CLI. I start with the easiest way, which is to run it from Docker. Next, is a standard, manual installation on both Windows and Linux, complete with a PowerShell routine that uses aliases to make it easier to keep Flyway up to date and to switch between versions. Finally, I'll describe briefly the advantages and disadvantages of using a Package Manager like Chocolatey. Read more

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