Written by Francesco Canovai In the previous instalment, we introduced the logical replication feature which has been added to PostgreSQL 9.4. Let’s go on exploring the multitude of new features that version 9.4 brings to the Operation field, easing the management of PostgreSQL databases for system and database administrators. pg_prewarm pg_prewarm is a new extension to solve the problem of slow...

Version 9.4 of PostgreSQL, soon to be released, has many innovations for administrators, including the introduction of support for logical replication, which is the first step towards the integration of multi-master replication into core PostgreSQL. In this two-part article we will show you the main new features for administrators; we begin with logical replication, and describe the following...

Up until now, reading this blog has kept you up-to-date with the latest developments in PostgreSQL. This time I would like to invite you to meet the team of 2ndQuadrant at the PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2014 which took place in Madrid on October 21st-24th. As you know, 2ndQuadrant offers 7 days a week, 24 hours a day support to companies all over the globe. As you can well imagine, to be able to...

Picking back up this week’s theme of where you can publicize your PostgreSQL related project at, you’re probably reading this blog entry because it appeared on the Planet PostgreSQL blog aggregator. There are “Planet” feeds around many open-source projects. The Debian and GNOME ones spawned off the Planet software, which now powers a ton of other blogs such as the the well regarded Planet Python...

The software license PostgreSQL is released under makes it extremely friendly to businesses who would like to use the database in commercial products. Partly as a result of this, a significant amount of PostgreSQL development is donated by companies who sell products derived from the database (even entire forks of the source code). Normally this feedback loop works well: companies are able to take...

I doubt many people can tell you exactly when the first time they read a map was. Mine was memorable though. Circa 3rd grade, I went through the usual battery of standardized tests for the first time, which included map reading. I did pretty bad, which was odd because it was the only section I bombed like that. Concerned that perhaps I had some sort of learning problem related to spatial data or...

I already did the long conference entry here, so just a quick update: slides from PGEast are posted and next week I’ll be at the increasingly misnamed MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, California. One thing I’m known for now is ranting about cheap Solid State Drives and how they suck for database use. The Reliable Writes wiki page collects up most of the background here. The situation the last few...

This week’s water falling from the skies isn’t turning into snow. And on days when it’s clear, my car is covered with tree pollen. While they means something different to most people, to me these are the signs that the spring conference season is about to start. There’s a conference in North America during each of the next three months containing serious PostgreSQL content, and this year I’m...

Following up on last month’s Tuning Linux for low PostgreSQL Latency, there’s now been a giant pile of testing done on two filesystems, three patches, and two sets of kernel tuning parameters run. The result so far is some interesting new data, and one more committed improvements in this area that are in PostgreSQL 9.1 now (making three total, the other two are monitoring patches). I’ll be...

One of the challenges when dealing with a new database design is that you don’t know things like how big the tables will end up being until they’re actually populated with a fair amount of data. But if the design has to factor in the eventual scalability concerns, you can’t deploy it to obtain that data until the estimation is done. One way around this is to aggressively prototype things. Use...