Simon’s PlanetPostgreSQL

Postgres-BDR is an open source project from 2ndQuadrant that provides multi-master features for PostgreSQL. We have pursued a joint strategy of providing both working code available now and also submitting the features into core PostgreSQL. Postgres-BDR 1.0 runs on a variant distro of PG9.4. This is in Production now and receives regular maintenance and security updates. 2ndQuadrant will support this until 9.4 End of Life in December 2019. One of the greatest achievements to come out of our work on BDR is the logical replication technology. Our engineers spent a considerable amount of energy to contribute the tech to PostgreSQL core and I feel especially proud that this is a headline feature of the upcoming PG10 release. And Now BDR 2.0 …  BDR 2.0 runs on community PG9.6 as (more…)

Great conference! Paris is a great venue for travellers across Europe and worldwide. PgDay Paris 2017 was held in English and attracted a wide audience from many other countries: UK, NL, CH, BE, US, SE - and that was just the people I spoke to. Je suis desolee ne parler ou ecrit pas en francais. Je suis un developpeur seulement. I spoke in English about the new features in PostgreSQL 10 regarding Replication & Recovery. All very well received by a large technical audience. Logical replication, physical replication improvements, quorum commit, replication lag measurement and a ton of fine detailed improvements. No slides, sorry. Come to the conferences! Meet people, hear their stories and share yours. I travelled to Paris through London on a day of public murders that made news (more…)

GitLab, thanks for using PostgreSQL 9.6 and its replication and backup facilities. We're sorry that you lost your database: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-incident/ Thank you for posting this publicly to allow us to comment on this for your postmortem analysis. I'm very happy that you monitor Replication Lag, that is good. Replication lag of 4GB is at times normal, so shouldn't have caused major concern. I've recently fixed a bug in replication that caused replication to hang in some cases for up to a minute; we released a public fix to that and it will be included in the next maintenance release of PostgreSQL 9.6. It's not certain that the bug was hit and, if it was, whether that was enough to cause the slow down noted. The openness of your response (more…)

Reading mailing lists can damage your health, as I recently discovered on the PostgreSQL Performance list where backup was being discussed. First off, don't read blogs for finding out critical pieces of info. Read the docs because they are accurate, fully reviewed and well maintained. I should add that I was the initial author of them as well, so maybe it's OK to carry on reading... pg_start_backup() is a function we execute to start a base backup. It was part of the original API for physical backup introduced in PostgreSQL 8.0. It's now been mostly superceded by the replication command BASE_BACKUP, which is most frequently executed by the pg_basebackup utility. So what does a base backup actually do? Well, first we execute a checkpoint so that as many changed data blocks are (more…)

Mirror mirror on the wall, Who is the fairest Database of all? A frequently asked question, certainly. DB-Engines recently announced it's DBMS of the Year. Maybe the cool thing is that PostgreSQL is in 3rd Place. Yee-ha, an open source project is up there! Let's look closely about what this means. PostgreSQL.org's agreed response was this... "It's great to see the continued success of PostgreSQL being reflected in DB-Engines rankings. It's clear that the strength of the following for the World's Most Advanced Open Source Database is enough to outweigh the largest software companies as people continue to choose to move away from commercial databases." though because of commercial sensitivity this was toned down to this "It's great to see the continued success of PostgreSQL (more…)

CHAR(16) Conference was a live conference in NYC held on 6 Dec 2016, focusing on Scalability for Business. The Speaker Panel was recorded, so you can find out what happened here: https://youtu.be/eLjBoZr4dTc (1 hour) Eric David Benari hosted an hour long "chat show" format, featuring Mason Sharp Petr Jelinek Peter Eisentraut Simon Riggs Jonathan Katz Other videos? No, sorry. Obviously, if you have to pay to attend, but we post the videos for free, then fewer people will attend. So next time please come along for the conference and find out what's happening, ask questions and enjoy chatting with the attendees. Hope to see you next year (more…)

CHAR(16) Conference on Scalability for Business went very well in the heart of New York City. Hotel Pennsylvania was a great venue; convenient for travel and a great conference venue with coffee, food and evening drinks. Jonathan Katz was great as MC for the conference, while Eric David Benari did a great job of hosting the Speaker Panel and keeping everybody on their toes with surprising and revealing questions. We'll be posting the video for that sometime soon. All the presentations were well received and the room was full all day long. Corridor feedback was that the speakers were good and the content was "dense" and very much in line with the specialised nature of the conference. Many good detailed questions after each talk, always a good sign people are tuned in. Thanks (more…)

What to do when disaster strikes... (various topics) King Kong attacks! Lure up tall building and attack with biplanes Godzilla’s eggs hatch Team up with European Special Forces operative to escape, then call in airstrike on Madison Square Gardens Watch the Rangers lose at home (same as above) Global Warming descends quickly Stay holed up in Public Library, burn copies of “MySQL In 32 Days” to stay warm Assault on Precinct 13 Write memo to boss about false economy of staying in cheaper neighbourhoods Alien mothership hovers over city Rousing speech about the dangers of NoSQL... "...won't go quietly into the night...", "...fight them on the beaches..." etc; wait for aliens to die from fatal flaws in their technology Lose database servers in both Availability (more…)

Keynote at PgConf.EU was well attended. I have already written about my impressions of the conference here. PostgreSQL is becoming a complete solution architecture for data, based upon the capabilities to push and pull data to/from other datastores, including other types of datastore. A variety of components, large and small make up that full architecture, including PostgreSQL Postgres-BDR Postgres-XL I really didn't have time to discuss the details, but those are being covered in full at CHAR(16) Conference: Scalability for Business on December 6, 2016 in New York City. Hope to see you there. There are also conferences in San Francisco, Austin and Tokyo coming up over the next month, though none of those are focusing purely on Scalability for Business (more…)