Postgres and Open Source Experts

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:

1. That high IO latency is an …

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 …

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 …

Maybe...

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

1. A standard provision disk for GCE will give you ~ 80MB/s random write.
2. 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 …

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 …

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 …

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). …

First let me say that I attended pgConf.eu like I attend every conference (that I am not running). I show up for a few hours on the first day, then I come back and attend my talk. I don't take travel lightly and as much as I bromance my fellow elephant bretheren, I want to explore the sights and this was freaking Ireland people.

I had an odd feeling for …

In August I spoke at NYCPUG on Dumb Simple PostgreSQL Performance. The talk was well accepted and there was about 60 people in attendance. I have always enjoyed my trips to NYC but this is the first time I have taken a leisurely look at the city. I found myself enjoying a water front walk from 42nd, through the Highline, to Battery Park, all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge …

We do quite a bit of work for King County Library systems. The library system has 45 branches and runs the Open Source Evergreen ILS. One of the very smart things that the Evergreen project decided was that their database of choice would be PostgreSQL. One of the things that the Evergreen project is not good at is supporting LTS releases of Linux and therefore certain things can be a …