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PostgreSQL Conference West 2009 Call for Papers

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 …

The shortest path between two points

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. …

Hardware problem solved, when you really need some cache.

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 …

Thanks Stefan

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. …

8.3.7 TPS and checkpoint segments

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 …

Default TPS performance of 8.3.7

I recently purchased some used hardware for some performance testing of PostgreSQL. I didn't want to interrupt the great work that Mark Wong was doing with the PostgreSQL Performance Lab. The testing I am doing is a bit different than Mark's. Where Mark is testing various filesystem performance via PostgreSQL using DBT2 and FIO and wanted to go up a level. I am testing using the PostgreSQL tool pgbench which …

Surprising events from a top 20 list

In a completely unscientific review of community popularity I was reviewing the active members of various channels on #freenode. For those that don't know, Freenode is the defacto destination for the Open Source community on IRC. This is where you will find official community support channels for such open source luminaries as #gentoo, #ubuntu, #mysql and of course #postgresql. The List

Ubuntu
Gentoo
Linux
Debian
Python
ArchLinux
Django
Haskell
Perl …

My turn on Oracle purchasing Sun.

I feel like I am coming late to this topic. All the pundits have already had there say and the blogosphere has been rampant. I have been talking with a lot of MySQL folks lately, encouraging them to at least test PostgreSQL as an alternative. MySQL folks are nervous. They don't like the opportunity Oracle brings to the table. This morning I was asked quite bluntly, "From your perspective what …

The great netbook giveaway

At PostgreSQL Conference East, Platinum Sponsor EnterpriseDB raffled two Netbooks. This is the video of the raffle (only 5 minutes). Of particular interest is a certain Major Contributors response.

Escaping data madness

We had an interesting issue crop up this past week. The question was, "How do we properly escape the following string...?". The string was:

You can't have it that way can you?

That seems like a pretty simple string right? On insert you would do one of the following:

   (E'You can\'t have it that way can you?');
   ($$You can't have it that way can you?$$);
   ('You can''t have it that …

Experts in Postgres and Open Source Infrastructure

PostgreSQL Conference West 2009 Call for Papers

The shortest path between two points

Hardware problem solved, when you really need some cache.

Thanks Stefan

8.3.7 TPS and checkpoint segments

Default TPS performance of 8.3.7

Surprising events from a top 20 list

My turn on Oracle purchasing Sun.

The great netbook giveaway

Escaping data madness

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