Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

"I want to work on optimizing all my queries all day long because it will definitely be worth the time and effort," is a statement that has hopefully never been said. So when it comes to query optimizing, how should you pick your battles? Luckily, in PostgreSQL we have a way to take a system-wide look at database queries: 

Ever since PostgreSQL 11 we have JIT (Just-In-Time compilation). Information about JIT is displayed in explain analyze plans, but up to this moment, explain.depesz.com didn't display it properly. But not anymore. Thanks to release 1.05 of Pg::Explain and subsequent change in templates for the site, you can now see nice JIT info. Hope you'll find … Continue reading "explain.depesz.com – now with JITs"

Recently I ran across grand sweeping statements that suggest containers are not ready for prime time as a vehicle for deploying your databases. The definition of "futile" is something like "serving no useful purpose; completely ineffective". See why I say this below, but in short, you probably are already, for all intents and purposes, running your database in a "container". Therefore, your resistance is futile.

PostgreSQL query optimization with CREATE STATISTICS is an important topic. Usually, the PostgreSQL optimizer (query planner) does an excellent job. This is not only true for OLTP but also for data warehousing. However, in some cases the optimizer simply lacks the information to do its job properly. One of these situations has to do with cross-column correlation. Let’s dive in and see what that means.

As a GIS newbie, I've been trying to use local open data for my own learning projects. I recently relocated to Tampa, Florida and was browsing through the City of Tampa open data portal and saw that they have a Public Art map.

Our PostgreSQL 24×7 support team recently received a request from one of our customers who was facing a performance problem. The solution to the problem could be found in the way PostgreSQL handles query optimization (specifically, statistics). So I thought it would be nice to share some of this knowledge with my beloved readers. The topic of this post is therefore: What kinds of statistics does PostgreSQL store, and where can they be found? Let’s dive in and find out.

This post continues my quest to explore Postgres native partitioning and determine if it is a good fit for my OpenStreetMap data in PostGIS. I show how I am planning to implement a partitioning scheme in a way that a) works well for my use case, and b) is easy to implement and maintain.

Millions of databases are being migrated to PostgreSQL today. This is because of the liberal PostgreSQL license in particular that invited more contributions to PostgreSQL and eventually made it Enterprise Grade. I have presented and also blogged about some of the rich enterprise features as following, those are otherwise available for an additional cost with some commercial databases.

PostgreSQL Person of the Week Interview with Valeria Kaplan: I am originally from what is now known as Kazakhstan and what was then USSR, but I have moved around the world quite a bit and, at the moment, live in the UK. My background is in communications and marketing and I worked in the pharma industry and academia before joining Data Egret. Prior to that I only had a very remote idea about databases, the nearest that I came to working with them was my experience with FileMaker.

This post covers the first part of my path in considering native Postgres partitioning and how it might be helpful to my work with OpenStreetMap data in PostGIS. Partitioning tables in Postgres can have significant benefits when working with larger data sets, and OpenStreetMap data as a whole is generally considered a large data set. The post following this one will outline the steps I am taking to implement partitioning with data loaded by PgOSM-Flex.

An online event organized by PgTraining.

PgTraining online webinar on 2021-03-12 (Italian)

PgTraining, the amazin italian group of people that spread the word about PostgreSQL and that I joined in the last years, is organizing an online event (webinar) on next 12th April 2021.

When those of us who work on Postgres High Availability explain how HA in Postgres works, we often focus on the server side of the stack. Having a Postgres service running with the expected data set is all-important and required for HA, of course. That said, the server side of the stack is not the only thing that matters when implementing high availability. Application code has a super important role to play, too.

The desire to use Pod tolerations to schedule Postgres instances sometimes comes up around complex Kubernetes deployments.

Over the years I saw some people find themselves in position where they have to start dealing with PostgreSQL with minimal, or none, prior exposure. This leads to problems with seemingly easy tasks – how to change config? How to find stuff in logs? So I decided to write some blogposts to be able to … Continue reading "Starting with Pg – where is the config?"

In this blog post, I'll show you how to run multiple instances of the same PostgreSQL version on RHEL/CentOS 7 and Fedora.

I have spent sometime exploring all the SQL command changes in PostgreSQL 14, this blog will provide a brief summary about the SQL changes along with some examples. There are exciting new features that in progress for PG-14, this blog will only focus on the SQL changes that are committed and will be released with PG-14. Most of then SQL command changes are minor enhancements, there are some SQL command patches that are still under consideration, have mentioned those briefly in the last section.

Without the “AS”

Babelfish: the Elephant in the Room?

On December 1st, 2020, Amazon AWS announced Babelfish. Babelfish “adds an endpoint to PostgreSQL that understands the SQL Server wire protocol Tabular Data Stream (TDS), as well as commonly used T-SQL commands used by SQL Server. Support for T-SQL includes elements such as the SQL dialect, cursors, catalog views, data types, triggers, stored procedures, and functions”. Wow.

Recently a colleague in our sales department asked me for a way to partition an area of interest spatially. He wanted to approximate customer potential and optimize our sales strategies respective trips.
Furthermore he wanted the resulting regions to be created around international airports first, and then intersected by potential customer locations, in order to support a basic ranking. Well, I thought this would be a good opportunity to experiment with lesser-known PostGIS functions .

check_pgbackrest is designed to monitor pgBackRest backups, relying on the status information given by the info command.

If you run Linux in production for any significant amount of time, you have likely run into the "Linux Assassin" that is, the OOM (out-of-memory) killer. When Linux detects that the system is using too much memory, it will identify processes for termination and, well, assassinate them. The OOM killer has a noble role in ensuring a system does not run out of memory, but this can lead to unintended consequences.