In Part 3 of this series (here are Part 1 and Part 2), I would like to demonstrate how the development of a new feature for Barman would flow through the Kanban board. The Scenario Suppose, as a team leader in the Barman project, one day I suddenly have the brilliant idea of adding the “Super Feature” functionality to Barman. After speaking with the development team I create a post-it for the...

Barman 2.2 introduces support for parallel copy, by improving performance of both backup and recovery operations in your PostgreSQL disaster recovery solution. Barman is a piece of software that has been incrementally improved since its conception in 2011. Brick after brick, with just one goal in mind: foster a disaster recovery culture in PostgreSQL, by making the whole backup/recovery process...

In Part 2 of this series, we will continue our journey within the developmental dynamics of the Barman open source project for PostgreSQL database backup and disaster recovery. After providing a small introduction to devops and Kanban in Part 1, let’s focus on the basic element of our daily management: The Boards. Our Kanban boards Our activities are managed on 3 different Kanban boards, one for...

We very often hear about devops culture, lean and agile methodologies, kanban, pair programming, peer review, testing, and many more; but how many of us could effectively put these things into practice? This is the part 1 of a 3-part series, in which we will share our experience in these areas, showing the principles, processes and technologies harnessed by 2ndQuadrant. We will also explore the...

If you live in the Melbourne area and you are passionate about PostgreSQL then don’t miss the chance to come to the Melbourne PostgreSQL Users Group Meetup this Monday, 21 November. I will be highlighting the major new features of PostgreSQL 9.6 and Barman 2.0. The meetup will start at 6PM, and will be followed by drinks. Location is Inspire9 in Richmond. Attendance is free of charge, but...

Now Available! Debian and Ubuntu packages for Power Architecture. The official announcement was published last Friday, September 30, 2016: the PostgreSQL repository for Debian and Ubuntu packages, apt.postgresql.org, has been extended by adding binary packages of IBM’s Little Endian POWER8 architecture. Fantastic, isn’t it? What few know is how we achieved this success. The primary ingredient...

This is my (very) biased opinion, but I am ready to bet that once you try Barman 2.0 you’ll agree with me. Version 2.0 takes Barman to a new level, thanks to full support of PostgreSQL’s streaming replication protocol for both backup operations, continuous, and synchronous WAL shipping. You might ask – what does this mean exactly? Well, I will give you some examples: You can now safely have zero...

Starting from Barman 1.6.1, PostgreSQL standby servers can rely on an “infinite” basin of WAL files and finally pre-fetch batches of WAL files in parallel from Barman, speeding up the restoration process as well as making the disaster recovery solution more resilient as a whole. The master, the backup and the standby Before we start, let’s define our playground. We have our PostgreSQL primary...

PostgreSQL 9.6 has extended the traditional framework available for physical backups by allowing users to take backups concurrently. Barman will transparently support this new set of functions without requiring the pgespresso extension. The pgespresso extension, conceived by our Simon Riggs, allowed marking the start and the stop of a backup process even on a read-only standby server. Through...

The upcoming version 1.6.1 of Barman will introduce a few interesting new features which consolidate its central role in business continuity installations of PostgreSQL databases. Discover why. Version 1.6.1 of Barman, backup and recovery manager for PostgreSQL, is on the way (at the time of writing, we have just finished rolling out the first alpha version, which is available for public testing)...