If you’re looking for a heavy dose of information about PostgreSQL performance tuning, you’re going to find the next month very interesting. We at 2ndQuadrant have been working on two books about PostgreSQL 9.0 this year. You can pre-order those right now, and as I’m staring at a home printed copy of my PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance book right next to me at the moment, I can assure you that one...

Whether or not you made it our CHAR(10) conference last month, you can now relive part of the experience by downloading the conference slides. Some of those were posted live during the conference, some showed up later, but almost everything is there now. Sadly, Nic Ferrier’s entertaining presentation about how WooMe (acquired by Zoosk) was scaled up using Londiste and Django wasn’t available in a...

This week I did something I’d prefer to never repeat: I left the country, did something useful, and made it back again in the same day. The occasion was the FreeBSD Developer Summit, held just before BSDCan–the convention that happens in Ottawa the week before PGCon every year. So I get to head right back again next week, but stay a while that time. The FreeBSD developers were nice enough to...

If you’re running Linux, and particularly if you’re running a database on Linux, it’s been hard to recommend any filesystem other than plain old ext3 in recent years. Some of the alternatives that looked interesting at one point–jfs, ReiserFS–are completely abandoned at this point. The one that has been almost viable for some time now is XFS, originally an SGI projecs. And it’s back to being in...

A few weeks ago I presented an updated 2010 version of my talk on database hardware benchmarking at PG East. CPU and memory performance are particularly important for a PostgreSQL database, because every individual query runs as a single process. Therefore, the speed of your fastest core determines how fast any one query can execute at, and in modern systems that’s quite likely to bottleneck based...

Today is the deadline for the special room rate at the hotel hosting this month’s PostgreSQL Conference East 2010. If you’ve been procrastinating booking a spot at the conference, as of tomorrow that will start costing you. My talk is on Database Hardware Benchmarking and is scheduled for late afternoon on the first day, Thursday March 25th. Those who might have seen this talk before, either live...

The new Hot Standby feature in the upcoming PostgreSQL 9.0 allows running queries against standby nodes that previously did nothing but execute a recovery process. Two common expectations I’ve heard from users anticipating this feature is that it will allow either distributing short queries across both nodes, or allow running long reports against the standby without using resources on the master...

Checkpoints can be a major drag on write-heavy PostgreSQL installations. The first step toward identifying issues in this area is to monitor how often they happen, which just got an easier to use interface added to the database recently. Checkpoints are periodic maintenance operations the database performs to make sure that everything it’s been caching in memory has been synchronized with the disk...