Postgres and Open Source Experts

As mentioned over at the PgUS website, the PostgreSQL Conference West 2009 registration is now open.. I will be giving a talk on Replicator 1.8.1 (which was just updated to 8.3.8). I will also be giving a talk on PITRTools.

In order to make our talk slots available to all who would like to give a presentation at PostgreSQL Conference West 09, we have extended our talk deadline until September 5th. If you have already submitted a talk, you will be notified of your acceptance (or not) by September 1st. For those that submit talks after August 25th, you will be notified by September 7th. As always you can find …

From the hackers:

Replicator 8.3-1.8.1 It is recommended to update your 8.3-1.8.0 installation. No changes required for replication databases or configuration files. Release notes: - Fixed a bug that lead to occasional crashes of the master's backend when performing updates to a table with dropped columns. - Fixed a couple of minor mcp_stat problems.

• Download it here.
• Project site

Reminder: We are in the midst of the PostgreSQL Conference West call for papers. The call for papers ends 08/20/09. If you wish to be considered to present you must submit a talk.

I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Replicator 8.3-1.8. Everyone jump start their engines over here.

PostgreSQL Conference West 2009 Call for Papers June 24th, 2009, the PostgreSQL Conference U.S. team is pleased to announce the West 2009 venue and call for papers. This year the premiere West Coast PostgreSQL Conference will be leaving its roots at Portland State University and moving north to sunny Seattle, Washington. The event this year is being held at Seattle Central Community College from October 16th through 18th. The move …

Recently I was doing some benchmarking on one of our machines. The benchmarking wasn't going so well due to bad batteries on the RAID controller. I had instructed one of our System Administrators to take care of the problem. Long story short, the Administrator went down a very long trail to an obvious solution. The trail was well mapped, thought out and precise. It however missed some important points. …

As reported in my last blog, Stefan was having much greater success with his pgbench results than I. In reviewing why, we found a problem with the hardware. What I like about this problem is that the results in the previous blog post become more interesting. As a reminder I was running 16 connections over 4 different users at 1M transactions. Below is the results from a single user from …

So while doing the benchmarking of the various parameters, Stefan pointed out the my numbers were ridiculously low. I wasn't really paying attention because I was looking at differences between parameters but then he posted me an example of a single thread pgbench using my same parameters. His machine is a dual core connected to 10 spindles on a NetAPP. In theory my machine should be faster. It is not. …

Continuing my postgresql.conf changes I ran a new test yesterday with checkpoint_segments set to 300. As a reminder the original results and specs of the machine being used in the test are here. The results of the new test below:

pghost:  pgport: 6000 nclients: 4 nxacts: 1000000 dbName: bench
transaction type: TPC-B (sort of)
scaling factor: 100
number of clients: 4
number of transactions per client: 1000000
number of transactions …