(DISCLAIMER: Republishing this article originally written by Aleksandar Ikonic and published back in January 2021). Do you feel your database is growing too big or too old? Hard to maintain? Well, I hope I might be able to help you a bit with that. The text you’re about to read is a real life experience of scaling a monolith database to be able to support a top 250-website (according to alexa.com).
Some (not so) cool movies that I watched recently
Recently I haven’t been having that much time to write about tech stuff. That’s a bummer and I hope to improve that in the future. However, my wife and I are huge movie lovers and we spend pretty much every evening watching some cool movie (or a tv show). And frankly I invest solid time […]
Unstructed.tech is now UnstructedTech.com
Yep! Time to update your bookmarks. I decided to dump the unstructedtech.com, mostly because it’d cost me almost $100 bucks to renew it now, which I’m definitely not going to do. On the other hand, I planned to migrate to .com version for a while now, so, here we are 🙂 Here’s a LI post […]
Why Azure SQL DBs become Inaccessible
tl;dr Because you lost the access to Azure Key Vault (AKV) or Managed HSM. And you can find the culprit for the problem in your Error Log. Just search for “AzureKeyVault” and it’ll give you a clue. For those looking for super-short answer, well, there you go. Restore the access, revalidate the key and you’ll […]
The Man Who Mistook His Debugger for a Hat
DISCLAIMER: I like writing about stuff that I’m actively learning about. Unless I explicitly state so, I DO NOT claim any kind of expertise. I write because I want to deepen my knowledge and because I hope someone might find it useful. If you are looking for expert-level article, you will be dissapointed. There is […]
Reflecting on two years in Microsoft
“It will be like drinking from the fire hose”. This is the explanation that people of Reddit would use whenever someone would ask “How working in Microsoft looks like?”. And I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been thinking about writing this retrospective for a long time. Hell, even when I started, back in September 2022, I […]
Getting started with WinDbg
I’m anxious of unknowns. Seriously. Whenever I’m faced with something that is new and unknown, especially if it’s work related, my brain will try running away screaming in anxiety. Like so: Suffice to say, WinDbg was absolutely one of those things that I’ve never, ever in my life even considered opening. No sir. Nope. I’ll […]
Attach debugger when process starts
I wrote five articles (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5) where I explored various ways on how to attach the debugger the moment the (Windows) process starts. But then I got bunch of complaints that there’s simply too much info. People were asking for tl;dr. A brief version of a […]
What does GFlags do under the hood?
Ever wondered about it? There are like 100 knobs that you could turn and enable all kinds of cool things. But how does it work? What does it do? Is it some inner magic or does it rely on things that Windows provides out of the box? Time to find out 🙂 NOTE: If you’re […]
The Dark Hole of GetAddrInfo() – Part 2
In Part 1 I brought up all the weirdness of GetAddrInfo(). Things like the fact that it’s way more complex than I anticipated and that there are bunch of input parameters that I couldn’t decipher. I also mentioned that behavior of itself is a bit weird, to say at least. And that’s what I’m going […]