Datadog Database Monitoring can surface enormous detail — and bill for it. The skill is choosing the few signals that answer real cost and reliability questions, and not paying to collect noise nobody acts on.
The skills that make a good cost-aware DBA — measuring usage, finding structural waste, balancing cost against reliability — transfer almost directly to AI workloads. Database engineers are unusually well positioned to own AI cost.
A practitioner walkthrough of the review method: what to look at, in what order, how to quantify an opportunity honestly, and how to turn findings into a prioritized 30/60/90-day plan.
Aurora cost hides in places the console doesn't foreground — I/O charges, oversized writers and readers, replica sprawl, and storage. A structured way to find and reduce each without hurting reliability.
Table and index bloat and unused indexes are well-known Postgres problems — and direct cloud-cost problems: wasted storage, write amplification, and extra I/O. How to measure both with read-only queries and remediate safely.
How CloudNativePG, GitOps, and external secrets make per-application Postgres viable without hiding the operational cost.
When to choose Azure Flexible Server vs Citus for PostgreSQL on Azure — failover behavior, connection pooling, and the workload shapes where each architecture wins and breaks.
How Cassandra's commit log, Memtable, and SSTable pipeline works, why write amplification is the dominant operational cost, and how compaction strategy selection changes it.
When Cloud SQL's managed PostgreSQL hits its limits and AlloyDB's columnar cache and HTAP architecture become worth the migration complexity and cost jump.
Three May 2026 breakout projects close the gaps that stop database teams from moving schema changes, query assistance, and operational workflows to AI: declarative Postgres migrations, local LLM inference, and a full agent platform.
The highest-starred new open-source projects in April 2026 targeting production-scale AI agent memory, protocol enforcement, and Postgres environment management — what breaks when agents leave single-developer scope.
How to codify repetitive DB tasks into testable, reusable Claude skills that produce consistent SQL, runbooks, and migration outputs instead of one-off chat prompts.
The highest-starred new open-source projects in April 2026 relevant to database engineering, infrastructure, and AI tooling — focused on eliminating manual context re-injection across system design, platform automation, and AI memory.
The second wave of March 2026 breakouts: an agent that learns from every conversation, a Rust vector index that outperforms FAISS at a fraction of the memory, and a Kubernetes-native agent control plane.
A pragmatic checklist to defend the business case for migrating away from Microsoft SQL Server.
Six open-source projects from Q1 2026 that converged on eliminating the manual scaffolding between AI agents and production infrastructure: context management, local cloud testing, and vector retrieval.
Understanding the financial nuances, OCPU conversions, and hidden costs of bringing your Oracle licenses to OCI.
The engineering reality and ROI of migrating from Oracle to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.
The highest-starred new open-source projects in February 2026 — eliminating the context tax that slows AI-assisted code review, infrastructure generation, and database operations.
Why the default License-Included model on AWS RDS is a financial trap for enterprise database workloads.
A deep dive into the cost savings and mechanics of applying Azure Hybrid Benefit to SQL Server deployments.
A reference pattern for keeping large database outputs out of model context by using scripts that summarize evidence before the agent sees it.
How to reduce your Azure Synapse compute bill by right-sizing dedicated pools and offloading to serverless.
A framework for managing commercial database licensing costs across the four major cloud providers.
A comprehensive framework for reigning in cloud database costs, focusing on licensing, right-sizing, and architectural tradeoffs.
A reference operating model for turning human database runbooks into machine-usable agent contracts.
Nine breakout repos across four themes — MCP protocol adoption, agent memory infrastructure, AI-native platform ops, and database automation — that eliminated the hand-built glue code between AI agents and production systems.
Why database teams should store agent instructions, runbook contracts, and review policies in the repository instead of in memory.
Database repositories contain hidden rules human reviewers know: never add a blocking index at peak hours, never widen IAM without owner approval. Agent review surfaces these violations before merge — without displacing the human judgment that set the rules.
Six open-source projects that collectively delivered the missing infrastructure layer for production AI agents: secure sandboxes, deployment platforms, persistent memory, token-efficient encoding, and AI-native storage.
A practical mental model for how coding agents plan, call tools, observe results, and complete infrastructure work without treating the model response as the whole system.
Three November 2025 open-source releases eliminate manual work from three engineering reliability tasks — multi-database backup verification, self-hosted log and trace collection, and SQL static analysis in CI pipelines.
October's memory and retrieval breakouts: a structured agent memory framework with benchmarks, a self-hosted cognitive memory engine, and sub-10ms semantic search without a vector database cluster.
Three October breakouts targeting LLM prompt verbosity, parallel agent orchestration, and fragmented hybrid search stacks — all reducing coordination overhead in AI engineering.
A PostgreSQL kernel experiment shows why moving torn-page protection from WAL to background flush can change write latency.
Six open-source tools from Q3 2025 that closed the infrastructure gaps blocking AI agents in production: persistent memory, intelligent model routing, and natural language database access.
What changes in replication when upgrading from PostgreSQL 14–16 to PostgreSQL 18: parallel apply, pg_createsubscriber, and surfaced conflict visibility.
The highest-starred new open-source projects in August 2025 where AI takes over cloud operations, infrastructure provisioning, and production Postgres coding.
PostgreSQL 18 introduces fundamental changes to the storage engine — asynchronous I/O, parallel logical apply, and improved conflict visibility are the changes operators need to understand before upgrading.
PostgreSQL vacuum failures often start with blocked cleanup, table bloat, and weak lock observability during peak load.
The gap between AI prototype and production system is routing tables, deployment YAML, and observability scaffolding. August 2025's top breakouts targeted exactly the code engineers keep rewriting: model routing logic, agent deployment manifests, and PostgreSQL diagnostics.
Why a PostgreSQL double write buffer prototype failed despite compiling, and what it reveals about AI-assisted systems design.
The risk in a natural-language SQL agent is not bad SQL — it is authority compilation: a user sentence becomes a database operation unless the control plane proves, before execution, which role, rows, cost, and columns the query is allowed to touch.
Six Q2 2025 open-source breakouts that closed the gap between AI agents and engineering infrastructure across system design, platform operations, and database tooling.
PostgreSQL index-only scans only stay fast when covering indexes and visibility map maintenance work together.
PostgreSQL vacuum stalls are often symptoms of lock pressure, table bloat, and missing operational visibility.
Three May 2025 open-source projects replace multi-tool assembly in document ingestion, deployment governance, and PostgreSQL backup with single-binary or configuration-first alternatives.
May 2025's most-starred new projects solve three specific database team problems: backup restores that are never verified, internal knowledge that can't be retrieved, and AI agents blind to your schema history.
A pre-go-live architecture review for MongoDB Queryable Encryption — key management, field classification, query type constraints, driver requirements, and key rotation.
Replacing the translation overhead between business questions and SQL queries requires an architecture that bridges LLM intent parsing with strict execution validation and schema retrieval.
How CloudNativePG, GitOps, and External Secrets turn Postgres-on-Kubernetes into an operational isolation pattern.
Six high-traction open-source projects from Q1 2025 converged on eliminating the manual integration layer between AI assistants and production systems across databases, platform operations, and developer tooling.
DB and cloud automation fails when partial failures leave the database, cloud account, and ticketing system describing different operation states.
How Postgres chat agents turn intent into SQL, and why production systems need schema controls, validation, and auditability.
Why porting InnoDB’s double write buffer to PostgreSQL breaks on buffered I/O, fsync semantics, and background writer design.
Nine breakout repositories across three themes — agents that operated computers, RAG that grew a graph spine, and databases that finally spoke natively to LLMs — define what actually shifted in the engineering stack in 2024.
A 2027 cloud database architecture roadmap for teams that can no longer satisfy consistency, latency, residency, and recovery SLOs with a single engine.
Prompt-level guardrails fail open when the agent misinterprets context. The only boundary that mechanically rejects destructive SQL is the database — dedicated read-only roles, sanitized view schemas, and a network path that application credentials never touch.
Giving an AI coding agent your application's Postgres credentials is the default mistake — the agent inherits every permission the app has. Database-enforced read-only roles, replica routing, query limits, and project-scoped MCP config are the alternative that actually fails closed.
Which PostgreSQL 16 and 17 changes operators actually need to prepare for: logical replication improvements, vacuum visibility, connection limits, and monitoring additions that change on-call behavior.
MongoDB Queryable Encryption stores and queries sensitive fields in encrypted form — what it enables, how it differs from standard FLE, and where the query type constraints bite.
How to position Prometheus and Grafana as the open-source baseline for teams that cannot send every byte of database telemetry to managed services.
How to configure Datadog Database Monitoring for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Aurora — query samples, explain plans, wait event analysis, and the specific Agent settings that make the difference between metric collection and real observability.
How to choose between AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI for database-backed systems by matching managed database failure behavior to your system's dominant recovery requirement.
Why generic server monitoring fails for Apache Cassandra, and how to track the true operational signals of a distributed masterless database.
Review checklist for database-backed cloud applications: connection saturation, migration locking, retry amplification, and region dependency failures.
How to instrument PostgreSQL and MySQL with postgres_exporter and mysqld_exporter, configure Prometheus scrape jobs, and build Grafana panels that surface the metrics that matter — with working PromQL queries.
PostgreSQL's pgcrypto is a cryptographic function library, not a key management system. Treating it as one guarantees your encryption keys will eventually leak.
Monitoring PostgreSQL requires looking past the operating system and into the internal bookkeeping of MVCC, autovacuum, and replication streams.
How to set database alert thresholds that catch real failures without burning the team on autovacuum noise, checkpoint churn, and replication lag spikes — with specific values for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Aurora.
Why Transparent Data Encryption ticks compliance boxes but fails against compromised credentials, and how to push encryption boundaries up the stack.
The seven MySQL and Aurora metric groups that matter for production operations — threads, replication lag, InnoDB buffer pool, slow queries, connections, locks, and disk — with exact SQL, CloudWatch metrics, and alert thresholds.
How to use CloudWatch and Performance Insights to root-cause Aurora and RDS incidents without deploying third-party agents.
Database changes in CI/CD require separate gates for schema migrations, backfills, and expand-contract patterns — not just a shell command before deployment.
The eight PostgreSQL metric groups that matter for production operations — queries, connections, replication lag, autovacuum, locks, cache pressure, checkpoint behavior, and bloat — with exact SQL and alert thresholds.
Search index drift is a truth-management failure: when to rebuild vs. dual-write vs. CDC, and how to bound user-visible staleness.
Before you can adopt AI-assisted triage, your database dashboard needs a foundation built on saturation, locking, and lag metrics.
How pgvector adds vector storage and similarity search to PostgreSQL, what the three distance operators do, and the index you must create before you hit 100K rows.
Three March 2025 open-source projects that eliminate the iteration pauses engineers manually bridge — research review loops, vector index calibration, and agent provisioning YAML.
Granting an autonomous AI agent access to your database breaks every assumption of traditional RBAC. How to secure databases against unpredictable, unbounded AI queries.
How tree-based retrieval can improve DB runbooks, schema docs, and incident knowledge over chunked vector search.
In March 2024, Redis Ltd changed Redis 7.4+ to a non-OSS license. Here is what that actually means for your deployment — and what Valkey is.
MySQL 8.4 is the first long-term support release in the 8.x line — five breaking changes that require verification before any production upgrade.
Shopify-style per-merchant sharding prevents one large tenant from turning shared commerce database infrastructure into a shared outage.
A systematic runbook for assessing MongoDB version upgrade risk — FCV, driver compatibility, deprecated operators, and rollback paths before any production cutover.
A SQL-driven audit workflow for identifying unused, duplicate, bloated, and missing indexes in PostgreSQL before they drain write performance and storage.
The difference between read committed, repeatable read, and serializable isolation in operational terms — and why most applications are running with weaker guarantees than engineers assume.
Aurora Serverless v2 scales ACUs rather than to zero — understanding the cost floor, scale-up lag, and workload fit before you commit to it for production OLTP.
A DBA-friendly explanation of how vector search works, why GPUs help, and where vector retrieval fits inside modern database and AI systems.
A DBA-friendly walkthrough of how modern GPU databases execute large analytical SQL queries using columnar storage, parallel scans, and GPU aggregation.
A practical, DBA-friendly explanation of why modern analytical databases are increasingly using GPUs for scans, joins, aggregations, and AI-adjacent workloads.
A DBA-friendly explanation of SIMD and SIMT using query execution, vectorized processing, and GPU mental models instead of hardware jargon.
How CPU, GPU, and TPU architectures differ in ways that matter for databases and AI workloads — and which compute class to reach for when adding vector search, embedding generation, or GPU-accelerated analytics.
When the query planner gets row estimates wrong, queries regress silently. This runbook diagnoses statistics drift and restores accurate plans.
Aurora Global Database delivers sub-second cross-region replication and under-one-minute RTO for disaster recovery — but it is not active-active, and application failover is never automatic.
What CAP theorem actually says about distributed database tradeoffs, why the CP vs AP framing is more useful than the theory, and what it means for your system when the network fails.
The decision framework for choosing between a cache, a queue, and a database — including the failure modes that appear when engineers use the wrong one for the job.
SELECT * causes four distinct problems that compound at scale: it prevents covering index usage, transfers unnecessary data, breaks application code silently, and defeats column pruning in analytical systems.
Modeling a product catalog across relational, document, and search-index layers: where each fits and why a single schema fails all three workloads.
How PostgreSQL estimates row counts, why those estimates are wrong for correlated columns and skewed distributions, and what engineers can do when the planner picks a bad plan.
PostgreSQL declarative partitioning only speeds up queries when the partition key appears in the WHERE clause — without it, you get the overhead of many tables with none of the pruning benefit.
OCI migration risk model for Oracle-heavy enterprises — where the lift-and-shift boundary shifts from the database tier into dependent application contracts.
Blocking and deadlocks are two distinct failure modes that require opposite responses — confusing them leads to retry logic that doesn't help and investigations that point at the wrong cause.
A diagnostic runbook for logical replication lag, apply worker failures, replication conflicts, and schema drift between publisher and subscriber.
Why a low-cardinality index is often worse than no index, how the query planner uses selectivity estimates, and when to build a partial index instead.
Without a connection pool, traffic spikes exhaust OS-level resources before a single slow query runs — here is what actually happens and how to fix it.
Assessing lock type, table size, reversibility, and rollback plan before every schema migration — a structured checklist for zero-downtime deployments.
A structured runbook for identifying which cost dimension is driving your AWS RDS or Aurora bill before making any changes.
Choosing the wrong MySQL binary log format silently breaks replication or bloats the binlog — this is the decision tree for picking the right one.
A repeatable runbook for proving that your database backups are actually restorable — with exact commands, decision tree, and automation patterns.
How to read PostgreSQL EXPLAIN output, what seq scan vs index scan actually means in practice, and the three numbers that matter most in any query plan.
Physical replication copies bytes; logical replication copies row changes — and confusing the two causes silent schema drift, sequence divergence, and failed zero-downtime upgrades.
Read replicas add read throughput but they do not reduce write load, do not eliminate replication lag, and silently serve stale data under write bursts — understanding those constraints before you add replicas is the decision engineers skip.
Spanner prevents inventory oversells under concurrent checkouts; Pub/Sub and Dataflow push stock events to BigQuery without blocking reservation writes.
Diagnosing and resolving connection exhaustion in PostgreSQL: too many clients, idle-in-transaction accumulation, and the case for connection pooling.
Why PostgreSQL connections are expensive, what a connection pool actually does, and the difference between session mode, transaction mode, and statement mode in PgBouncer.
WiredTiger's internal cache is MongoDB's primary memory tier — how to read its metrics, recognize eviction pressure, and size it correctly for your working set.
A systematic runbook for diagnosing Aurora MySQL writer CPU spikes — from Performance Insights through lock contention, long transactions, and read offload.
Cloud Run autoscales compute, but Cloud SQL connection limits, Memorystore eviction, and Pub/Sub backpressure are where capacity planning actually lives.
A systematic runbook for diagnosing MySQL replication lag — from initial SHOW REPLICA STATUS to parallel apply, long transactions, and relay log space.
MySQL ignores an index when the optimizer estimates a full scan is cheaper — which happens when cardinality is too low, statistics are stale, or the query shape doesn't match index selectivity. How to diagnose which problem it is and what to do about each.
A step-by-step runbook for diagnosing and resolving autovacuum failures: dead tuple accumulation, bloat, and transaction ID wraparound risk.
What replication lag actually measures in PostgreSQL, the three distinct lag components that most monitoring tools conflate, and which one matters for your RPO.
PostgreSQL's query planner depends entirely on per-column statistics that go stale after bulk loads — here is what that means for query plan quality and how to fix it.
A backup file proves you captured data. Recovery is the process of producing a running, consistent database on a different system inside your RTO. They are not the same thing, and confusing them is how incidents get worse.
What a checkpoint actually does in PostgreSQL, why dirty page flush matters for recovery time, and what engineers should monitor to avoid checkpoint pressure.
Redis has eight eviction policies and a maxmemory limit. The policy you pick determines whether your cache degrades safely or silently corrupts your hit rate under load.
A systematic runbook for diagnosing slow MongoDB queries — from explain output through COLLSCAN, index selectivity, in-memory sort, and WiredTiger cache pressure.
MongoDB's default behavior is a full collection scan when no index supports the query. Here is what you need to know about single-field, compound, and multikey indexes before your collection grows past 10K documents.
The two mechanisms databases use to survive crashes — redo brings committed changes forward, undo rolls back uncommitted ones — and why the distinction matters operationally.
Single-table design in DynamoDB is an operational bet that access patterns are stable enough to encode into partition and sort keys — when the approach pays off, and when evolving query requirements turn it into a migration project.
Why PostgreSQL and MySQL use B-trees while Cassandra and RocksDB use LSM trees — the read/write tradeoff that determines which storage engine fits your workload.
How to read MySQL EXPLAIN output systematically — type column, key column, rows estimate, and Extra flags — so you stop adding indexes blindly.
A repeatable workflow for diagnosing MySQL slow queries — from enabling the slow log through reading EXPLAIN output to committing a safe fix.
The InnoDB buffer pool hit ratio and size are the first metrics to verify on any MySQL server — a default 128MB pool on a 32GB machine sends every query to disk.
Autovacuum is not optional maintenance — it is the mechanism that prevents table bloat and transaction ID wraparound from taking your database offline.
A structured runbook for diagnosing slow query root causes in PostgreSQL — missing indexes, stale statistics, lock contention, and I/O saturation — in the order that wastes the least time.
What write-ahead logging is, why every ACID database uses it, and what engineers need to know about LSN ordering, crash recovery, and replication lag.
How multi-version concurrency control lets readers and writers run without blocking each other — and why misunderstanding it causes table bloat, undo log growth, and stalled vacuums.