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Remembering to check the docs: Autovacuum

I was on a call very late last night with a good customer. Well, it was very early. They were having some performance problems and we were talking through how to resolve them before the EST wake up. It is late, we are all tired and of course there are too many people on the call.

So what is the problem? The problem is they weren't running Autovacuum. Now many …

GNU and the FSF should be split up

The FSF should be broken up.

Yes, I really did just write that. I believe the the FSF no longer fulfills its mission. Wait, let's back up a step. I can feel the torches started to be covered in pitch and the frankenstein cry of, "kill the heretic" starting to rumble through the old streets of the Free Software country. I am not here to say that the FSF is …

Writing a custom conflict handler for Bucardo 4

Bucardo, an asynchronous multi-master replication system (or, maybe the asynchronous multi-master replication system for PostgreSQL, cause I know of no other actively developed ones), deals with replication conflicts by providing conflict handlers in a form of standard (built-in) or custom code procedures. The built-in conflict handlers resolve a conflict by taking a row from the source or the target databases (in Bucardo 4 only 2 masters are supported, called 'source' …

... and that was my last day

This has been cooking for a while now, and now it's time to open it up: July 31st, 2012 was my last day with Command Prompt, Inc.

I joined Command Prompt in October 2005. Back then I wasn't a very prolific blogger, it seems, because it took me six months to get this fact out. I haven't improved much since then, even though boss Josh Drake kept telling me …

Fedora 17 not so easy PostgreSQL configuration

I don't usually post rants here, but this one might be actually helpful to others, so let's make an exception. It will be related to installing PostgreSQL from distro-specific packages. I usually prefer setting PostgreSQL from sources, unlike the majority of users; nevertheless, I'm familiar with how popular distros, like Debian or Fedora, manage their PostgreSQL layouts. Or so I thought until today.

My task was simple: install PostgreSQL instance …

The Write Ahead Log: Essentials

WAL (acronym for the Write Ahead Log) is the mechanism that Postgres uses to implement durability (the D in ACID) of data changes in the face of a system crash. WAL is also a critical component for Postgres to provide binary replication as well as online binary backups.

In considerations of closed source development

Open Source development has a lot going for it, as Bruce Momjian readily points out in a recent blog [1]. However, I believe he missed some key points that are positive for closed source development. Bruce asserts that with Open Source development the developers are the face of the software. That is true but certainly isn't always a good thing. There is a reason that the majority of software development, …

Binding PostgreSQL server to specific CPU cores in Linux

Recently we had a customer who was running PostgreSQL 8.2 on a 32 cores system with 64GB of memory. They were deploying this server in addition to the already running one with 24 total cores and 32GB of memory. PostgreSQL configuration has been adjusted for extra resources, the database has been partitioned roughly in half between the 2 servers and the queries running against both servers were similar.

Suprisingly, when …

Migrating hierarchical queries from Oracle to PostgreSQL

This is the second part in a series of blog posts describing PostgreSQL analogs of common Oracle queries

One of the most intricate Oracle specific constructions is "START WITH ... CONNECT BY". According to Oracle's documentation, the syntax is: SELECT [query] [START WITH initial_condition] CONNECT BY [nocycle] condition. This statement is commonly used to traverse hierarchical data in the parent-child order. It's easier to illustrate how it works with …

Cool and Sexy: Open Source PostgreSQL enterprise contenders

As with any healthy project, there will be offshoots and people will take the source, fork it and try to create something new, better, different or just.... How that person feels it should be. This is a good thing, it leads to new ideas, new communities and sometimes truly interesting pieces of software.

Postgres-XC has been around for a while, it is primarily developed by NTT and EnterpriseDB. It has …