You now have time until March 14th, 2016 to submit your talk to “5432…MeetUs!”, the conference organised by 2ndQuadrant that will take place in Milan next June 28th and 29th. Further information on the call for papers can be found on the conference website.

During the last October’s Italian PGDay and European PostgreSQL conference, my friend Marco Nenciarini and I had the pleasure to talk about a new open source plugin for PostgreSQL, called redislog. In that presentation ( “Integrating PostgreSQL with Logstash for real-time monitoring”) we provided an example of our exploration/experimentation approach, with extensive and thorough coverage of...

2ndQuadrant is proud to announce the release of version 1.5.1 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL. This minor release introduces support for ‘per-server’ concurrency of maintenance operations through the ‘cron’ command. Internally, Barman is now able to spawn a new sub-process for WAL archive operations on a specific server. For this purpose, the ‘archive-wal’ command has been...

Barman 1.5.0 enhances the robustness and business continuity capabilities of PostgreSQL clusters, integrating the get-wal command with any standby server’s restore_command. In this blog article I will go over the reasons behind this feature and briefly describe it. One of the initial ideas we had in mind when conceiving Barman was to make it, one day, a very large basin of WAL files, collected...

Version 1.5.0 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL, has been released. Barman is now able to return upon request any available WAL file for a given server, allowing DBAs to integrate it in the restore_command of any standby server, for example. It also introduces the so-called “retry hook scripts” which allow users to execute custom scripts before and after an event (e.g. backup)...

Today version 1.4.0 of Barman has been officially released. The most important feature is incremental backup support, which relies on rsync and hard links and helps you reduce both backup time and disk space by 50-70%. Barman adds one configuration option, called reuse_backup. By setting this option to link, Barman will transparently reuse the latest available backup in the catalogue of a given...

PostgreSQL 9.4 introduces a new statistic in the catalogue, called pg_stat_archiver. Thanks to the SQL language it is now possible, in an instant, to check the state of the archiving process of transactional logs (WALs), crucial component of a PostgreSQL disaster recovery system. Introduction and reasons The need for the pg_stat_archiver view comes from the last few years of experience with Barman...

November 7th 2014 was the eighth Italian PostgreSQL Day, the national event dedicated to the promotion of the world’s most advanced open source database. The Italian edition is one of the most enduring in the whole Postgres community (the first one took place in July 2007) and the results of the activity of a very established non profit organisation such as ITPUG (Italian PostgreSQL Users Group)...

“ Ooooh that smell! Can’t you smell that smell?“. That’s a classic rock song by legends Lynyrd Skynyrd, I know. But also a warning that your new Barman 1.3.3 installation can now emit. Consider the following scenario: You have scheduled a weekly full backup of your Postgres server with Barman – the usual (and boring) 4AM on a Saturday You have even configured Nagios/Icinga to correctly monitor the...

Version 1.3.3 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL, has been released. Barman is now able to send alerts in case the latest available backup for a server is older than a given time interval (e.g. a week) as well as to retry copy operations after temporary issues such as network connection failures. An optimised algorithm for copy through rsync has been implemented too, improving...