Shaun Thomas
Postgres High Availability Performance Architect, EDB
Shaun has spent decades working in the Postgres ecosystem, specializing in architecture and high availability. His "PostgreSQL High Availability Cookbook" serves as a treatise to the lessons he learned over that time. His guidance brought EDB Postgres Distributed a consensus-driven proxy for greatly simplified cluster topology. If you're interested to learn more on these topics, check out his regular blog on EDB's site.
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Technical Blog
Building an Immortal Cluster By now we’ve learned about basic Postgres Docker usage and rudimentary clustering. For the uninitiated, constructing a Postgres cluster can be a daunting task, and we’ve greatly simplified the process. So why don’t we take the next logical step and use Docker to deploy a cluster that is effectively immortal as well? How is that possible? Why, with repmgr of course...
Technical Blog
In our last article, we explored how to run Postgres in some very basic Docker scenarios. Based on our experiments back then, we can obtain images, create containers, and mount to various types of storage. Boring! It’s not just boring, it’s mundane. It doesn’t do anything. Sure we can run Postgres in a container, but that’s true about a lot of things. You know what’s exciting? Setting up Postgres...
Technical Blog
Fans of Rapid Application Development (RAD!) are probably already familiar with Docker, but what does that have to do with Postgres? Database-driven applications are a dime a dozen these days, and a good RAD environment is something of a Holy Grail to coders and QA departments alike. Docker lets us spin up a Postgres instance in seconds, and discard it with a clean conscience. There have even been...
Technical Blog
During the Postgres Open 2017 conference in San Francisco, someone came to the 2ndQuadrant booth and struck up a conversation with me. During our shameless geeking out over database mechanics, he asked me if pglogical supported the new Postgres 10 partitions. Given my noted expertise in all things Postgres, I answered in the appropriate manner: "I have no idea. I’ll have to look into that." Well...
Technical Blog
One of the handy things Oracle does with dates is allow manipulation with standard arithmetic. Want tomorrow's date? Add one. Want a week ago? Subtract seven. Postgres does something close with its INTERVAL syntax, under the explanation that we don't necessarily want to make assumptions about what is being added to a date or timestamp. But Postgres has a big secret in the fact we can arbitrarily...
Technical Blog
For a long time, the Postgres query planner has sported a huge blinking neon blind-spot that frustrated and enraged DBAs throughout the universe to a level just shy of murderous frenzy. How is this even possible? What terrible lurking horror could elicit such a visceral response from probably the most boring and straight-laced people ever to draw breath? What else? Correlated statistics. The...
Technical Blog
One of the coolest things about Postgres functions is that they can return rows as if they were a table. Not only is it possible, but creating a set-returning function in Postgres is almost frighteningly trivial when compared to other database engines. In fact, some Oracle users are probably rolling their eyes and muttering “Just use a cursor!” already. Just hear us out! Postgres functions can...
Technical Blog
Testing within the context of a database can sometimes seem a bit overwhelming. Not only is it necessary to create a reasonable set of test data to bootstrap multiple tables, but we need some reliable invocation system to compare query, view, and function output to expected results. And that is no small feat. For a very long time, the "easiest" way to test end-user database objects involved...
Technical Blog
With the christening of PG Phriday at its new location, it’s only fitting that we revisit a frequent boon and bane of organized storage: partitioning. When volume and scale reach a certain point that the very laws of physics become a barrier to efficiency, partitions are a crucial tool to escape the otherwise inevitable pile of unmaintainable bits. It’s not feasible to reindex a multi-terabyte...