Bruce Momjian
VP, Postgres Evangelist, EDB
Bruce Momjian is a co-founder of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, and has worked on PostgreSQL since 1996 as a committer and community leader. He is a frequent speaker and Postgres evangelist and travels worldwide appearing at conferences to help educate the community on the business value of Postgres advances and new technology enhancements. He is the author of PostgreSQL: Introduction and Concepts, published by Addison-Wesley.
Read Blogs
Postgres often lacks the sophisticated reporting of more established enterprise relational database systems. Sometimes that is because Postgres doesn't require as much monitoring and tuning, but there are legitimate monitoring needs which Postgres doesn't support. Thanks to the wait_event_type and wait_event columns added to the pg_stat_activity view in Postgres 9.6, it is possible to find which...
Technical Blog
Postgres includes lots of monitoring tools that allow you to see what is happening, but there are a few settings that really go into detail, e.g. log_statement_stats: SET client_min_messages = log; SET log_statement_stats = true; SELECT 100; LOG: QUERY STATISTICS DETAIL: ! system usage stats: 1 ! 0.000000 s user, 0.000000 s system, 0.000201 s elapsed 2 ! [0.000000 s user, 0.000000 s system total]...
Having covered the choice of certificate authorities, I want to explain the internals of creating server certificates in Postgres. The instructions are already in the Postgres documentation. When using these instructions for creating a certificate signing request ( csr), two files are created: -- certificate signing request file with extension req -- key file, containing public and private server...
When setting up ssl in Postgres, you can't just enable ssl. You must also install a signed certificate on the server. The first step is to create a certificate signing request (csr) file that contains the host name of the database server. Once created, there are three ways to sign a csr to create a certificate: -- Self-signed -- Signed by a local certificate authority -- Signed by a public...
Business Transformation
Unlike other database systems, Postgres makes the cleanup process visible and tunable to users. Autovacuum performs recycling of old rows and updates optimizer statistics. It appears in ps command output, the pg_stat_activity system view, and optionally in the server logs via log_autovacuum_min_duration.
EDB Labs
As an open source project, the Postgres community has always had great difficulty in measuring many aspects of Postgres adoption. For example, how many people use Postgres? We don't know, because people can get Postgres from so many sources, and we have no easy way to track them. Surveys tell us that Postgres is probably the fourth most popular database, but more detailed information has proven elusive.
EDB Labs
Prepared statements are queries where the constants used in the query are separated from the query text. While this improves security by avoiding SQL injection attacks, it also allows repeatedly-executed queries to avoid parsing and planning overhead by executing saved generic plans that represent queries with typical constants.
In 2013 I blogged about Postgres advancing in multiple directions at once. Having presented my Postgres 9.5 features talk six times already (with another one coming on Tuesday), I have noticed a broader pattern. Looking at my top-ten items from that presentation, you can see Postgres advancing in multiple use-case directions in the 9.5 release: Big data: brin (#2), sharding infrastructure (#9)...
As a followup to my scaling talk, I have written a draft of another talk, The Future of Postgres Sharding. It starts by explaining the advantages of sharding as a scaling option. It then covers future enhancements to individual Postgres features that, while useful on their own, could be combined to provide a powerful built-in Postgres sharding capability. I am hopeful this talk will help guide the...
News
I just returned from two weeks in Russia, and I am happy to report that Postgres is experiencing strong growth there. I have regularly complained that Russian Postgres adoption was lagging, but the sanctions have tipped the scales and moved Russia into Postgres hyper-adoption mode.