Author: Shaun Thomas

Oct122018 by Shaun Thomas6 Comments

PG Phriday: Studying Stored Procedures in Postgres 11

Studying Stored Procs in Postgres 11 With Postgres 11 looming on the near horizon, it's only appropriate to check out a recent beta and kick the tires a few times. Whether it's improvements in parallelism, partitions, stored procedures, JIT functionality, or any number of elements in the release page, there's a lot to investigate. It just so happens that I ran across a fortuitous event on Twitter when deciding on an appropriate topic. Behold! Wait! No! That's not what stored procedures are for! I felt so good like anything was possible When confronted with such a blatant corruption of such a cool new feature, it's only natural to question the wisdom of doing so. It is, after all, not a great idea to programatically consume transaction IDs. I said as much and moved on with life (more…)

Sep212018 by Shaun Thomas5 Comments

On Rocks and Sand

Shaun's PlanetPostgreSQL

When working with database capacity planning, there are a lot of variables to consider, and Postgres is no different in this regard. One of the elements which requires management is storage. However, there's an aspect of storage that escapes inspection almost without exception, and it's hiding in the shadows between the columns themselves. Alignment Basics In most low-level computer languages like C, in which the venerable Postgres is written, data types are addressed by their maximum size, regardless of how large they actually are. Thus a standard 32-bit integer which can store a value of just over 2-billion, must be read as a whole unit. This means even the value of 0 requires 4 bytes of storage. Further, Postgres is designed such that its own internal natural alignment is 8 bytes, (more…)

Aug302018 by Shaun ThomasNo Comments

[Video] Data Integration with PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL, Shaun's PlanetPostgreSQL

Just in case you missed the live broadcast, the video of my presentation below covers various topics around integration of PostgreSQL with other data sources and database technologies. This presentation covers the following topics: What is a Foreign Data Wrapper? How to query MySQL, a Flat file, a Python script, a REST interface and a different Postgres Node Perform all of the above simultaneously Take snapshots of this data for fast access Tweak remote systems for better performance Package as an API for distribution Stream to Kafka Write data to... MongoDB!? What does all of this have in common? It's an exciting topic, and I hope more developers and admins begin to see Postgres as the global integration system it really is (more…)

May42018 by Shaun Thomas2 Comments

PG Phriday: BDR Around the Globe

Shaun's PlanetPostgreSQL

With the addition of logical replication in Postgres 10, it's natural to ask "what's next"? Though not directly supported yet, would it be possible to subscribe two Postgres 10 nodes to each other? What kind of future would that be, and what kind of scenarios would be ideal for such an arrangement? As it turns out, we already have a kind of answer thanks to the latency inherent to the speed of light: locality. If we can provide a local database node for every physical app location, we also reduce latency by multiple orders of magnitude. Let's explore the niche BDR was designed to fill. What is Postgres-BDR? Postgres-BDR is simply short for Postgres Bi-Directional Replication. Believe it or not, that's all it needs to be. The implications of the name itself are numerous once fully (more…)

Apr202018 by Shaun ThomasNo Comments

PG Phriday: Securing PgBouncer

Shaun's PlanetPostgreSQL

We all love PgBouncer. It's a great way to multiplex tens, hundreds, or even thousands of client connections to a small handful of Postgres sessions. What isn't necessarily so endearing, is that it can't pass authentication from itself to Postgres, as each Postgres session may exist before the connection to PgBouncer is established. Or can it? Let's explore how things have evolved, but the news never really got out. Tell you what I got in mind As a proxy, PgBouncer authenticates on a per user/database basis. Since Postgres authenticates sessions before they connect, PgBouncer used to have no way to re-auth its own connections. The old, and probably most prevalent way to circumvent this, was to build a userlist.txt file that contained every user and password hash that should be allowed to (more…)

Jan192018 by Shaun ThomasNo Comments

PG Phriday: Adventures in BAR Management

Shaun's PlanetPostgreSQL

Backups are a critical component to a fully covered Postgres database infrastructure. In some ways, it's fair to say a database without a backup is no database at all---sometimes literally. 2ndQuadrant's Barman tool is aptly named as a Backup And Recovery Manager for Postgres, and it exists primarily for encouraging a stable and robust backup process. Backing up a database and then restoring from that backup often has an army of associated scripts and utilities. Some of these components are probably the Postgres default tools of pg_dump, pg_restore, and pg_basebackup. The rest are often shell scripts, homegrown or otherwise copied from blogs or git repositories. Let's just assume the best case scenario and assume all of these work just fine; I used to think the same thing myself. But a (more…)

Dec292017 by Shaun Thomas17 Comments

PG Phriday: Postgres on ZFS

Shaun's PlanetPostgreSQL

ZFS is a filesystem originally created by Sun Microsystems, and has been available for BSD over a decade. While Postgres will run just fine on BSD, most Postgres installations are historically Linux-based systems. ZFS on Linux has had much more of a rocky road to integration due to perceived license incompatibilities. As a consequence, administrators were reluctant or outright refused to run ZFS on their Linux clusters. It wasn't until OpenZFS was introduced in 2013 that this slowly began to change. These days, ZFS and Linux are starting to become more integrated, and Canonical of Ubuntu fame even announced direct support for ZFS in their 16.04 LTS release. So how can a relatively obscure filesystem designed by a now-defunct hardware and software company help Postgres? Let's find out! (more…)

Dec82017 by Shaun Thomas5 Comments

PG Phriday: Getting RAD with Docker [Part 4]

Shaun's PlanetPostgreSQL

PgBouncer is a popular proxy and pooling layer for Postgres. It's extremely common to reconfigure PgBouncer with repmgr so it always directs connections to the current primary node. It just so happens our emerging Docker stack could use such a component.In our last article, we combined Postgres with repmgr to build a Docker container that could initialize and maintain a Postgres cluster with automated failover capabilities. Yet there was the lingering issue of connecting to the cluster. It's great that Postgres is always online, but how do we connect to whichever node is the primary?While we could write a layer into our application stack to call repmgr cluster show to find the primary before connecting, that's extremely cumbersome. Besides that, there's a better way. Let's alter our stack (more…)

Nov242017 by Shaun ThomasNo Comments

PG Phriday: Getting RAD with Docker [Part 3]

Shaun's PlanetPostgreSQL

Building an Immortal ClusterBy now we've learned about basic Postgres Docker usage and rudimentary clustering. For the uninitiated, constructing a Postgres cluster can be a daunting task, and we've greatly simplified the process. So why don't we take the next logical step and use Docker to deploy a cluster that is effectively immortal as well? How is that possible? Why, with repmgr of course! 2ndQuadrant has a tool specifically designed to set up and maintain Postgres clusters. One of the components of repmgr is a daemon that can automatically promote replicas whenever the current primary goes down. Let's leverage that to make something that's always online until every node is stopped.My power is in my own handAs before, we're going to need a few scripts to manage the finer points. We can (more…)

Nov102017 by Shaun Thomas4 Comments

PG Phriday: Getting RAD with Docker [Part 2]

Shaun's PlanetPostgreSQL

In our last article, we explored how to run Postgres in some very basic Docker scenarios. Based on our experiments back then, we can obtain images, create containers, and mount to various types of storage.Boring!It's not just boring, it's mundane. It doesn't do anything. Sure we can run Postgres in a container, but that's true about a lot of things. You know what's exciting? Setting up Postgres streaming replication between two docker containers.Let's get started.He say "I know you, you know me"The first thing we need to do is create a container that will be our primary host. Postgres requires a user with REPLICATION permission, as well as a special entry in the pg_hba.conf file for the "replication" pseudo-database. We could start a regular Postgres container, connect to it, and set all (more…)