Month: November 2016
writer and wal writer PostgreSQL processes explained
By Kaarel Moppel – Look at the processes list on a server where Postgres is running, and you’ll see two writer processes among other background and client processes. One process is more specifically named wal writer. It’s still confusing that there are 2 similarly named writers. What do they do? From my experiences from training, […]
Parallel queries and SERIALIZABLE transactions
In version 9.6 PostgreSQL introduced parallel queries. The ability to use more than just one CPU core per query is a giant leap forward and has made PostgreSQL an even more desirable database. With parallel queries many workloads can be sped up considerably. However, in this article, I want to point out a small missing […]
Exposing PostgreSQL server logs to users via SQL
By Kaarel Moppel – During the last training session, a curious participant asked if there’s a way to easily expose the PostgreSQL database logs to users – and indeed, there’s a pretty neat way for SQL-based access! So this time, I’ll give you a quick demo on that. The approach, taking advantage of the File […]
PostgreSQL instance level encryption
There are a few different ways to implement database encryption – commonly on the operating system, filesystem, file or column level. That leaves out transport level encryption, which has been supported since 15 years. Each of these approaches counters a different threat model, and one can easily imagine that in the case of databases, where […]