Posts

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, who was making his first steps towards migrating a big database away from Oracle to Postgres, I thought there are not enough articles on PostgreSQL features and “hacks”, to achieve scalability to squeeze the last out of the hardware, to safely accommodate decent multi-terabyte size databases. Especially as […]

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, 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 some “magic […]

The topic of transaction performance is being as actual as relevant 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 parameters are already more or less tuned, it is usually really hard to magically squeeze […]

Pgbench is a very well-known and handy built-in tool that Postgres DBAs can use for quick performance benchmarking. Its 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!). 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 you are interested in the operational side as well. In […]