Posts

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 […]

Beginning of the year happens to be luckily somewhat slow at customers, so last couple of weeks I’ve had the chance to work on our Open Source PostgreSQL monitoring tool called pgwatch2 and implement some stuff that was in the queue. Changes include only a couple of fixes and a lot of new features… so […]

Something from the security realm this time – normally this side of the “database world” doesn’t get too much attention and “love” because it’s difficult/tedious and requires some deep understanding of how the system works…but ignoring security as we know can catch up with you badly. Anyways, not telling a real horror story here though, […]

A quick performance tip for all those wrestling with occasional un-performant queries in PostgreSQL. There’s one quite simple trick available that many don’t know about, that can be applied at “low cost” when slow queries are caused by poor planner estimates for your filter conditions. Read on for details. The problem So the thing with […]

2 weeks ago a new PostgreSQL major version with the number 10 was released (note the new numbering scheme!) and I already covered my favorite parts from the official release notes from a DBA’s point of view already here, so also take a look there if interested on the operational side as well. Here I […]

Last week a new PostgreSQL major version with the number 10 was released! Announcement, release notes and the “What’s new” overview can be found from here, here and here – it’s highly recommended reading, so check them out. As usual there have been already quite some blog postings covering all the new stuff, but I […]

Although Postgres being a great all-around product that can’t be beaten in price-performance ratio, there’s one area where things could be a bit better – that’s validation of replicas, or maybe even more widely all clusters. So the problem that not so many people know about is that after building a new replica there’s actually […]

It’s been quite some months since I last wrote about our Open Source PostgreSQL monitoring tool called pgwatch2, but now there’s again a reason for it – it got again a lot better! Changes include multiple new feature updates per requests from users and also some bugfixes. So a quick overview of new stuff here. […]