A MySQL server with disk at 95%, 180 GB of binary logs accumulated over six months. From there, a deep dive into binlogs: what they contain, why they exist, how they work with replication and point-in-time recovery, and above all how to manage them without breaking things.
A 200 GB PostgreSQL database with tables bloated to three times their actual size. Autovacuum was enabled but poorly configured. How to diagnose bloat, read pg_stat_user_tables, and tune without disabling anything.
Managing AI in a project is not about using ChatGPT. It means governing the impact of artificial intelligence on architectures, processes and people. Reflections from nearly thirty years of mission-critical systems.
In Italy, paying an IT consultant at 90 days is standard practice. In the rest of Europe, it's an anomaly. A direct comparison between European rules and Italian reality, with numbers, directives and practical strategies for freelancers.
From Appio Latino to Prati in 50 minutes of traffic and a €35 parking bill, or 18 minutes on an electric Brompton. The choice that changed my days — and could change yours.
A client with Oracle 19c on Linux and disappointing performance. Default installation, no tuning. Huge Pages, semaphores, I/O scheduler, THP and security limits: everything that was missing — with the before-and-after numbers.
A concrete analysis of the economic and strategic benefits of remote work in IT consulting companies. With real numbers, Rome's ring road, and a morning run at 6 AM.
A client with a three-level hierarchy — Top Group, Group, Client — where not all branches are complete. How I balanced a ragged hierarchy with self-parenting: whoever has no parent becomes their own parent.
A sales director asks how many customers were in the North region last June. The DWH can't answer because every update overwrites previous data. How I implemented an SCD Type 2 with surrogate keys and validity dates to give the business back its historical memory.
A fact table built on monthly invoice totals looked perfect. Then the business asked for product-level, line-level, customer-level detail. And the data warehouse went silent.
Managing AI in a project is not about using ChatGPT. It means governing the impact of artificial intelligence on architectures, processes and people. Reflections from nearly thirty years of mission-critical systems.
In Italy, paying an IT consultant at 90 days is standard practice. In the rest of Europe, it's an anomaly. A direct comparison between European rules and Italian reality, with numbers, directives and practical strategies for freelancers.
From Appio Latino to Prati in 50 minutes of traffic and a €35 parking bill, or 18 minutes on an electric Brompton. The choice that changed my days — and could change yours.
A concrete analysis of the economic and strategic benefits of remote work in IT consulting companies. With real numbers, Rome's ring road, and a morning run at 6 AM.
A real project management case: how I proposed GitHub and artificial intelligence to transform a chaotic software project into an ordered, measurable, and faster workflow.
A client with Oracle 19c on Linux and disappointing performance. Default installation, no tuning. Huge Pages, semaphores, I/O scheduler, THP and security limits: everything that was missing — with the before-and-after numbers.
Friday evening, the night before a go-live. Performance collapses. Using AWR and ASH I found a hidden full table scan in a stored procedure in under ten minutes — and the production release went ahead.
A client where every application user connected as the schema owner with the DBA role. How I restructured the Oracle security model by applying the principle of least privilege — with real SQL, custom roles and Unified Audit.
A client with a 2-billion-row transaction table and reporting queries that had gone from seconds to hours. How I solved it with Oracle partitioning — range, interval, partition pruning and local indexes.
An Oracle production database with no redundancy. A disk failure that brought everything to a halt for six hours. And the CEO's decision to invest in an Active Data Guard architecture with automatic switchover.
A 200 GB PostgreSQL database with tables bloated to three times their actual size. Autovacuum was enabled but poorly configured. How to diagnose bloat, read pg_stat_user_tables, and tune without disabling anything.
PostgreSQL does not distinguish between users and roles: everything is a ROLE. The correct mental model, a real case, and a complete example to build a truly maintainable read-only account.
A real-world PostgreSQL performance case where a LIKE '%value%' caused a full scan and degraded response times. Analysis, execution plan, and a scalable indexing strategy.
A real-world case where the optimizer chose a nested loop on 2 million rows because statistics were stale. How to read an execution plan, spot the red flags, and fix the root cause.
A MySQL server with disk at 95%, 180 GB of binary logs accumulated over six months. From there, a deep dive into binlogs: what they contain, why they exist, how they work with replication and point-in-time recovery, and above all how to manage them without breaking things.
A client with a standalone MySQL that crashed every month, taking down the entire application. My solution: a 3-node Galera Cluster with synchronous replication. From diagnosis to production, with all configuration files and critical parameters.
In MySQL and MariaDB a user's identity depends on the host they connect from. A real case, the authentication model explained in depth and the most common mistakes in access management.
An operation that should have taken five minutes — exporting a CSV from MySQL — turns into an investigation across multiple instances on the same server, Unix sockets, different ports and the secure-file-priv directive that blocks everything. From finding the right instance to exporting from the shell.
Filesystem at 92% on a 3-node MySQL Group Replication cluster. The culprit? Binary logs piling up on the main volume. From the initial alert to a dedicated volume migration, one node at a time, without losing quorum.