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. 

 

 

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Cluster, Cluster, Schema, Schema

There are 500k to 1-million words in the English language, so you would think that Postgres would be able to find a unique word for every aspect of the database, but unfortunately, that is not true. There are two cases where Postgres uses a single word to mean two different things, sometimes leading to confusion. The first word is "cluster". One meaning represents the data directory and postmaster...

The Effectiveness of effective_cache_size

Friday, May 4, 2012 Having reported the methods for finding the size of the kernel cache on Linux, I wish to highlight the importance of the postgresql.conf setting effective_cache_size. Unlike other memory settings that control how memory is allocated, effective_cache_size tells the optimizer how much cache is present in the kernel. This is important for determining how expensive large index...
EDB Labs

When to Use Multiple Clusters, Databases, or Schemas?

I previously explained that Postgres allows multiple databases per cluster. The outstanding question might be, when should I use multiple clusters, multiple databases, or multiple schemas?

Limiting Postgres Connections

Friday, February 24, 2012 During recent training, I realized there five ways to control who can access Postgres, and it isn't totally clear in the documentation how they fit together. There are basically a series of gates that users must pass through to connect to a Postgres database. I thought I would list them here, in the order they are applied: listen_addresses: This controls which network...

Sorting Performance Improvement for Postgres 9.2

As part of the work on Postgres 9.2, yesterday Robert Haas applied a much-discussed ( December, January, February) patch by Peter Geoghegan to improve sort performance. Having recently blogged about how work_mem affects sort performance, I thought I would re-run my tests to see the improvement: Temporary Storage | Old | New -----------------------+--------+------- magnetic | 68 | 67 magnetic...

Virtualizing Postgres

Postgres is an ideal database to run in a virtual environment or public/private cloud — one reason is that Postgres relies heavily on the operating system, rather than using features like raw devices. Second, its license is obviously very flexible for virtual deployments. I am often asked about running Postgres in virtual environments, and I usually answer that it runs just fine — and it does...
EDB Labs

What Is a GUC Variable?

Thursday, December 1, 2011 You might have heard the term "GUC" before, especially on the Postgres email lists. It is documented as an acronym meaning "Grand Unified Configuration", but the section it references doesn't mention the term "GUC" at all. Pretty obscure, huh? Our Grand Unified Configuration (GUC) system was created in 2000 as a way to control Postgres at various levels. You are probably...

Database Reliability

Wednesday, August 4, 2010 The database is usually a critical piece of infrastructure in an organization; when the database is down, many things stop working, so database reliability is often a serious concern. While the reliability of database software is important, for Postgres it is often the infrastructure that Postgres depends on that causes outages, not Postgres itself. We see this regularly...