Ideas for scaling PostgreSQL to multi-terabyte and beyond
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. […]
Are your foreign keys indexed?
Foreign key constraints are an important tool to keep your database consistent while also documenting relationships between tables. A fact that is often ignored is that foreign keys need proper indexing to perform well. This article will explain that and show you how to search for missing indexes. Index at the target of a […]
Correlation of PostgreSQL columns explained
After you ANALYZE a PostgreSQL table to collect value distribution statistics, you will find the gathered statistics for each column in the pg_stats system view. This article will explain the meaning of the correlation column and its impact on index scans. Physical vs. logical ordering Most common PostgreSQL data types have an ordering: they support […]
Next feature release for the pgwatch2 monitoring tool
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 […]
PostgreSQL: Parallel CREATE INDEX for better performance
PostgreSQL will shortly be released and it is therefore time to take a look at one of the most important new features provided by PostgreSQL 11: The ability to create indexes in parallel. For many years various commercial database vendors have already offered this feature and we are glad that PostgreSQL has become part of […]
What hot_standby_feedback in PostgreSQL really does
Many of you out there using PostgreSQL streaming replication might wonder what this hot_standby_feedback parameter in postgresql.conf really does. Support customers keep asking this question so it might be useful to share this knowledge with a broader audience of PostgreSQL users out there. What VACUUM does in PostgreSQL VACUUM is an essential command in PostgreSQL […]
PostgreSQL: Improving sort performance
Sorting is a very important aspect of PostgreSQL performance tuning. However, tuning sorts is often misunderstood or simply overlooked by many people. So I decided to come up with a PostgreSQL blog showing, how sorts can be tuned in PostgreSQL. Creating sample data To show how sorting works, I created a couple of million rows […]
3 ways to detect slow queries in PostgreSQL
When digging into PostgreSQL performance it is always good to know, which option one has to spot performance problems and to figure out, what is really going on on a server. Finding slow queries and performance weakspots is therefore exactly what this post is all about. There are many ways to approach performance problems. However, […]
A beginner’s guide to PostgreSQL’s UPDATE and autovacuum
Looking at the type of PostgreSQL support requests, we have received recently, it is striking to see, how many of them are basically related to autovacuum and UPDATE in particular. Compared to other databases such as Oracle, PostgreSQL’s way of handling UPDATE and storage in general is quite different. Therefore people moving from Oracle to […]
rules or triggers to log bulk updates?
Inspired by my co-worker’s recent blog post, I decided to revisit the old question of rules vs. triggers and run a little benchmark to see which one does better. About rules While triggers are well known to most application developers and database administrators, rules are less well known. The full name “query rewrite rule” […]
PostgreSQL clusters: Monitoring performance
When people are talking about database performance monitoring they usually think of inspecting one PostgreSQL database server at a time. While this is certainly useful it can also be quite beneficial to inspect the status of an entire database cluster or to inspect a set of servers working together at once. Fortunately there are easy […]
Adding an index can decrease SELECT performance
We all know that you have to pay a price for a new index you create — data modifying operations will become slower, and indexes use disk space. That’s why you try to have no more indexes than you actually need. But most people think that SELECT performance will never suffer from a new […]