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PostgreSQL is King! Last week was quite busy being a servant.

Last week was one of the busiest community weeks I have had in a long time. It started with an excellent time in Vancouver, B.C. giving my presentation, "An evening with PostgreSQL!" at VanLUG. These are a great group of people. They took all my jibes with good humor (Canadians gave us Maple Syrup, we gave them Fox News) and we enjoyed not only technical discussion but discussions on technology …

AWS performance: Results included

I am not a big fan of AWS. It is a closed platform. It is designed to be the Apple of the Cloud to the Eve of Postgres users. That said, customers drive business and some of our customers use AWS, even if begrudgingly. Because of these factors we are getting very good at getting PostgreSQL to perform on AWS/EBS, albeit with some disclosures:

That high IO latency is an …

Don't kill yourself

As a PostgreSQL consultant you end up working with a lot of different types of clients and these clients tend to all have different requirements. One client may need high-availability, while another needs a DBA, while yet another is in desperate need of being hit with a clue stick and while it is true that there can be difficult clients, there is no bad client.

What!!! Surely you can't be …

Along the lines of GCE, here are some prices

I was doing some research for a customer who wanted to know where the real value to performance is. Here are some pricing structures between GCE, AWS and Softlayer. For comparison Softlayer is bare metal versus virtual.

GCE: 670.00
16 CPUS
60G Memory
2500GB HD space

GCE: 763.08
16 CPUS
104G Memory
2500GB HD space

Amazon: 911.88
16 CPUS
30G Memory
3000GB HD Space

Amazon: 1534.00
r3.4xlarge
16 CPUS
122.0 …

GCE, A little advertised cloud service that is perfect for PostgreSQL

Maybe...

I have yet to run PostgreSQL on GCE in production. I am still testing it but I have learned the following:

A standard provision disk for GCE will give you ~ 80MB/s random write.
A standard SSD provisioned disk for GCE will give you ~ 240MB/s.

Either disk can be provisioned as a raw device allowing you to use Linux Software Raid to build a RAID 10 which even …

PDXPGDay 2014

I had the honor of being asked to give the introduction at PDXPGDay 2014 this past Saturday. I didn't speak very long but it was great to see a lot of the old stomping ground. It had been quite some time since I had been in the group of Wheeler, Roth, Wong, Berkus and a few others.

The conference was really a mini-conference but it was great. It was held …

apt.postgresql.org... a wonderful if flawed apt repository

The site apt.postgresql.org is a great resource for those who live in the Debian derived world. It keeps up to date with the latest postgresql packages and has a whole team dedicated to creating these packages. Of course, this is the Open Source world so not everyone agrees 100% with the way things are done in this project. As I noted here, there are some issues.

These issues are not …

Kicking the Donkey of PostgreSQL Replication

This is the title of a talk I am developing for the matured PostgreSQL Conference: PGConf NYC 2014 . Formerly a PgDay, this is now a full blown conference extending two days with three tracks. From all reports it is set to be the largest PostgreSQL Conference ever in the United States, surpassing even the old West and East series (which no conference in the U.S. has done to date). …

Security Considerations While Using ssh-agent.

Recently we got contacted by a customer, and started the typical remote access setup: ask them to open ssh port for our bastion server, create a new user for us, and add the corresponding ssh public key. Well, they promptly responded, and we tested access, got into their bastion server and then tried to get to one of the broken servers but, it was asking for a password. We just …

Managing pg_hba.conf With Ansible

pg_hba.conf is perhaps one of the easiest to understand configuration files in PostgreSQL. Its syntax is straightforward, the concept seems to resemble that of any popular IP filter or ACL mechanism in various software packages. pg_hba.conf is also well documented, like the rest of PostgreSQL, and we love it because it lets us do what we want without getting in our way. What else could we possibly ask of it? …

Postgres and Open Source Experts

PostgreSQL is King! Last week was quite busy being a servant.

AWS performance: Results included

Don't kill yourself

Along the lines of GCE, here are some prices

GCE, A little advertised cloud service that is perfect for PostgreSQL

PDXPGDay 2014

apt.postgresql.org... a wonderful if flawed apt repository

Kicking the Donkey of PostgreSQL Replication

Security Considerations While Using ssh-agent.

Managing pg_hba.conf With Ansible

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