Posts

Needless to say, security is a topic that nobody in the wider IT industry can ignore nowadays, with a constant flow of reports on data breaches of various scales. Most of such cases don’t result from direct attacks against databases though, but more from targeting Application / API / Webserver problems as database servers are […]

First off – not trying to kindle any flame wars here, just trying to broaden my (your) horizons a bit, gather some ideas (maybe I’m missing out on something cool, it’s the most used Open Source RDBMS after all) and to somewhat compare the two despite being a difficult thing to do correctly / objectively. […]

Again I could make good (hopefully) use of the “slow time” around the turn of the year…and managed to push out another set of features for our Open Source PostgreSQL monitoring tool called pgwatch2 – so a quick overview on changes in this post. Continuing the tradition I’m calling it “Feature Pack 4” as it’s […]

It’s been already a bit over a month since the last Postgres major version was released (and also the 1st minor update is out) so it’s not exactly fresh out of the oven…and as usual there has been already a barrage of articles on the most prominent features. Which is great, as I can save […]

Some weeks ago I wrote about some common concepts / performance hacks, how one can (relatively) easily scale to a terabyte cluster or more. And based on my experience visiting customers from various industries, 80% of them are not even reaching that threshold…but just to be clear I wanted to write another post showing that […]

Last weeks the first release candidate of the upcoming Postgres version 11 was released, stating that everything is going more or less as planned – great news! The 11 release is promising a lot of very cool stuff as usual, including – better partitioning, more parallization and JIT capabilities (which are not activated by default […]

After a recent chat with a DBA, making his first steps towards migrating a big database away from Oracle to Postgres, I thought there must be just too few articles on PostgreSQL features and “hacks”, aiding in achieving scalability to squeeze the last out of the hardware to safely accomodate some decent multi-terabyte size databases. […]

With summer fading away it’s time to get busy again – last couple of weeks I’ve taken time to work on our Open Source PostgreSQL monitoring tool pgwatch2 and partly on request from a couple of bigger organizations using the tool on a larger scale, added another batch of useful management / scaling features and […]

In my last post I described what to expect from simple PL/pgSQL triggers in performance degradation sense, when doing some inspection/changing on the incoming row data. Conclusion for the most common “audit fields” type of use case was that we should not worry about it too much and just create those triggers. But in which […]

First of course the big question – should we be using good old triggers at all? Well, actually I’m not going to recommend anything here as it’s an opinionated topic:) People well-versed in databases would probably see good use cases for them whereas modern application developers would mostly say it’s an awful practice – doing […]

Transaction performance topic being as actual as ever in spite of constant hardware improvements, we’re quite often asked how to improve in that area. But the truth is that when the most important PostgreSQL configuration paramaters are already more or less tuned, it is mostly really hard to magically squeeze that extra something out of […]

Pgbench is a very well known and handy built-in tool that Postgres DBAs can use for quick performance benchmarking. Main functionality/flow is super simple, but it also has some great optional features like running custom scripts and specifying different probabilities for them. One can also use bash commands to fill query variables for example. But […]