Valerie Parham-Thompson

With experience as an open-source DBA and developer for software-as-a-service environments, Valerie has expertise in web-scale data storage and data delivery, including MySQL, Cassandra, Postgres, and MongoDB.

Database

Postgres Covering Indexes and the Visibility Map

Covering indexes in Postgres came up in our weekly tech call because of a query optimization review one of the teams ...

Analytics

Spark + Cassandra Best Practices

Spark Overview Spark was created in 2009 as a response to difficulties with map-reduce in Hadoop, particularly in ...

MySQL

Using gh-ost for online schema changes

The pt-online-schema-change tool has been a workhorse for years, allowing MySQL DBAs to alter tables with minimal ...

Database

Postgres Security Patches Related to the Search Path

There were some security patches released this month for Postgres, to put further restrictions on pathways that ...

Database

PostgreSQL Backups

There are at least four ways to back up a Postgres database: SQL dump, filesystem snapshots, continuous archiving, and ...

Analytics

Using the MariaDB CONNECT engine to merge heterogeneous data sources

Background

Upgrading a Large Cassandra Cluster with cstar

I recently did an upgrade of 200+ nodes of Cassandra across multiple environments sitting behind multiple applications ...

Database

Postgres partial indexes on email address domains

When I first heard of Postgres partial indexes, I knew immediately that this would have solved a problem I had in MySQL ...

MySQL

Data encryption at rest

This blog post was co-authored by Peter Sylvester and Valerie Parham-Thompson Introduced in version 10.1.3 (and with ...

MySQL

Authenticating Vault against LDAP for accessing MySQL through ProxySQL

Earlier this year, I was presented with the challenge of streamlining user access to MySQL, allowing users self-serve ...

Cassandra

Cassandra information using nodetool

Cassandra nodetool provides several types of commands to manage your Cassandra cluster. See my previous post about ...

MySQL

Data encryption at rest in Oracle MySQL 5.7

Cassandra

Lightweight transactions in Cassandra

Cassandra support for transactions Unlike commonly used relational database platforms, Cassandra does not support ACID ...

Cassandra

Cassandra backups using nodetool

Cassandra nodetool provides several types of commands to manage your Cassandra cluster. See my previous posts for an ...

MySQL

Duplicate indexes in MySQL

Why do we sometimes want to keep duplicate indexes? I’ve done dutiful DBA work in the past to identify and remove what ...

Oracle

Migrating Oracle Workloads to Google Cloud - BMS

In these challenging and ever-changing times, most organizations would welcome the opportunity to reduce overhead, ...

MySQL

Detecting source of MySQL Queries with comments

Background As a MySQL DBA I already know the data changes that happen on my system. I have logs for that. However, it’s ...

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Oracle

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Analytics related blog posts

Analytics

Using Multi-Agent Reasoning for NLP-to-SQL

As data-driven decision-making becomes essential, access to that data shouldn’t require deep technical ...

Analytics

Becky's BI Apps Corner: OBIA 11.1.1.10.2

Upgrade jitters? If you’re running older versions of OBIA, the new 11.1.1.10.2 release brings game-changing features like automatic error handling and ...

Analytics

Oracle Data Integrator (aka Sunopsis) Now On OTN

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Valerie Parham-Thompson

Posts by Valerie Parham-Thompson

Postgres Covering Indexes and the Visibility Map

Spark + Cassandra Best Practices

Using gh-ost for online schema changes

Postgres Security Patches Related to the Search Path

PostgreSQL Backups

Using the MariaDB CONNECT engine to merge heterogeneous data sources

Upgrading a Large Cassandra Cluster with cstar

Postgres partial indexes on email address domains

Data encryption at rest

Authenticating Vault against LDAP for accessing MySQL through ProxySQL

Cassandra information using nodetool

Data encryption at rest in Oracle MySQL 5.7

Lightweight transactions in Cassandra

Cassandra backups using nodetool

Duplicate indexes in MySQL

Migrating Oracle Workloads to Google Cloud - BMS

Detecting source of MySQL Queries with comments

Recent news

Pythian Ranked on CRN's 2026 Solution Provider 500 List for Seventh Consecutive Year

Pythian Recognized as a Top AI & Data Consulting Firm for 2026

Pythian Recognized as Silver Winner in UKOUG Data Integration Partner of the Year Awards 2026

Pythian Leaders Recognized on CRN’s 2026 Women of the Channel List

Pythian and Three of Its Leaders Named Finalists for the 2025 CRN Women of the Year Awards

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Pythian’s Vanessa Simmons and Donna Williston Again Named to CRN’s 2025 Women of the Channel List

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Pythian Welcomes Shawn Gandhi as Senior Vice President, Customer Engineering, and Country Managing Director for Canada

Pythian Announces New Oracle Database@Google Cloud Migration Services

Pythian India Earns “Great Place to Work” Certification for Third Consecutive Year

Pythian Recognized on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500 List and DBTA’s 100 Companies That Matter Most in Data for 2024

Pythian Welcomes Brooks Borcherding as Chief Executive Officer

Pythian’s Vanessa Simmons and Donna Williston Honored by CRN on 2024 Women of the Channel Lists

Pythian Recognized as a Top Employer in Canada’s National Capital Region in 2024

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CRN Names Pythian’s Vanessa Simmons a 2023 Women of the Channel Power 80 Solution Provider

Award-Winning Marketing Veteran Christina O’Reilly Joins Pythian Services as Senior Vice President, Marketing

Pythian Makes Database Trends and Applications’ List of Trendsetting Solution Providers for 2023

Pythian Celebrates 25 Years of Enterprise Data, Analytics, and Cloud Success

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Pythian Named One of ‘The Companies That Matter Most in Data’ by Database Trends and Applications Magazine

Vanessa Simmons from Pythian Named on CRN’s 2022 Women of the Channel Power 70 Solution Providers List

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Pythian’s SAP Services Practice Grows by 300 Percent in 2021

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Pythian Services Recognized on CRN’s 2022 MSP 500 List

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Pythian Taps Seasoned Cloud and Data Expert Paul Lewis as CTO

Pythian Achieves Managed Services Provider Status In the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program

Keith Angell: Accelerating Enterprise Growth With Data And Analytics Through Remarkable Leadership

Pythian Achieves the Data Management Partner Specialization in the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program

Pythian Adds Snowflake Data Cloud Services Suite

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Pythian Appoints Keith Angell As CEO

Pythian Services Acquires Google Cloud Premier Partner Agosto

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Pythian Wins 2018 Google Cloud Data Analytics Partner of the Year Award

Pythian achieves Machine Learning Partner Specialization in the Google Cloud Partner Specialization Program

Pythian achieves Cloud Migration Partner Specialization in the Google Cloud Partner Specialization Program

Pythian achieves Google Cloud Platform Partner Specialization In Infrastructure

Pythian recognized as the winner of the Microsoft Canada Application Innovation IMPACT Award

Pythian’s Vice President of Business Development recognized as one of CRN’s 2018 Women of the Channel

Pythian recognized as a leader on the 2017 IAOP Global Outsourcing 100 List

BBM Messenger selects Pythian for major Google Cloud Platform migration

Pythian launches Analytics as a Service offering

Pythian named one of Canada’s top employers for the fourth consecutive year

Pythian achieves Google Cloud Premier Partner status

Rapid sales growth drives European expansion for Pythian

Pythian announces new Board of Directors