Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA

Every DBA hits this situation eventually. A query that ran in 40 milliseconds last month now takes eleven minutes, nobody deployed anything, and the developer swears the table “isn’t even that big.” The instinct is to add an index and hope. That works often enough to be genuinely dangerous, because it teaches you nothing about why it worked, and the next time the sam...

Every DBA has had that moment where a command looks simple on paper, but the database decides to teach you a lesson in production-style humility. For me, this happened during a MySQL InnoDB space reclaim activity. The task looked straightforward. We had a few large InnoDB tables where a lot of data had been deleted or moved over time. The logical data inside the table was muc...

One interesting issue we hit during one of the GoldenGate DAA to Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse testing was not really a replication failure. GoldenGate was running fine, the Replicat was not abended, the trail was being read, and stats were showing that records were getting processed. So from a GoldenGate side, everything looked healthy. But when we checked the Fabric Lakehouse,...