Version 1.3.1 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL, has been released. Barman now supports concurrent backup from PostgreSQL 9.2 and 9.3 servers, using the pgespresso extension, allowing users to issue backups from a streaming replicated standby server. Read the full announcement at http://www.pgbarman.org/barman-1-3-1-released/. Many thanks for funding towards the development of...

With every new release, PostgreSQL gets better at addressing the needs of developers, database and system administrators. If you are part of a dynamic business that delivers high quality products or services, Postgres is a candidate technology for managing your databases (in case you have any). A few days ago, Marco Nenciarini and I presented at FOSDEM 2014, in the PostgreSQL Devroom, the talk “...

Version 1.3.0 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL, has been released, making the tool more robust through a new code infrastructure in terms of output, subprocesses, remote commands, file system, events (‘hooks’) and metadata management. Barman now supports: hook scripts before and after archiving a WAL file network compression of remote backup and recovery operations immediate...

In a previous blog post, I have gone through the steps of setting up a basic CentOS 6.4 64bit Linux distribution using Vagrant on your Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Linux. We will continue digging in the devops culture/movement and finally setup PostgreSQL 9.3 using Puppet in a local virtual machine. This is what we are going to do now, together: install some “ cool tools” for Ruby install the puppetlabs...

My top #1 open source tool that I have discovered in the last year is definitely Vagrant. Vagrant is a software that helps you build and configure virtual environments for development and testing purposes. Vagrant relies on virtual machine providers such as VirtualBox, VMWare and AWS, as well as provisioning tools such as Chef and Puppet, allowing developers to clearly define their boxes using...

Version 1.2.3 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL, has been released, adding support for the upcoming PostgreSQL 9.3. Read the full announcement at http://www.pgbarman.org/barman-1-2-3-released/. About Barman Barman (Backup and Recovery Manager) is an open source administration tool for disaster recovery of PostgreSQL servers written in Python. It allows your organisation to...

The traditional Monash University Prato Centre, historical venue of the first European PGDay, will host the first edition of another conference: Open Source Software for Business, aka OSS4B. OSS4B 2013 will take place in Prato, Tuscany, Italy on September 19 and 20. Through the experience gained with several organisations of PostgreSQL related events, we have tried to bring this kind of conference...

Version 1.2.1 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL, has been released, introducing bandwidth limitation for both backup and recovery operations at three different levels: global, server (PostgreSQL instance) and tablespace. This feature gives database administrators finer control on periodical activities, reducing the impact of these operations on live systems. Read the full...

In our previous article we went through describing what retention policies are and how they can be enforced on your PostgreSQL server backups with Barman 1.2. In this post, we will go through the configuration aspects. For the sake of simplicity, we assume a typical scenario which involves taking full backups once a week through the “barman backup” command. Suppose you want to automatically keep...

Defining a disaster recovery plan involves defining backup policies. A key aspect of backup policies is to define how long backup data is retained for disaster recovery purposes. This applies to all digital content, including PostgreSQL databases. Barman 1.2.0 introduces automated management of backup retention policies of PostgreSQL servers. Retention policies were one of the midterm goals that...