I’ve just seen a presentation that says you can save money by running PostgreSQL in the cloud, because you won’t need to apply database software patches yourself. Hmmm. So what is the cost of installing a fix? Not much really. Surely there must be some benefit in installing a fix? This premise described offered us this economic argument: -ve cost: mantime to apply patch +ve benefit: zero Wow! Zero...

Keynote at PgConf.EU was well attended. I have already written about my impressions of the conference here. PostgreSQL is becoming a complete solution architecture for data, based upon the capabilities to push and pull data to/from other datastores, including other types of datastore. A variety of components, large and small make up that full architecture, including PostgreSQL Postgres-BDR...

Wed 2 Nov Michiel Toneman from Adyen kicked things off with a keynote mentioning how Adyen have been using PostgreSQL for the past 9 years. I wasn’t aware Michiel was speaking, though I was very happy that he mentioned 2ndQuadrant’s extensive support of their multi-Terabyte PostgreSQL installations. http://www.postgresql.eu/events/schedule/pgconfeu2016/session/1419-building-a-unicorn-on-an...

In an earlier post I commented on a post by Evan Klitzke on his reasons for recommending a move from PostgreSQL to MySQL. The summary was that the technical details were incorrect, apart from two points. This post returns to those points to discuss what we’ve done about them. 1. When one indexed column is updated then currently all indexes need to be maintained. When you have lots of indexes this...

As you may have seen, PostgreSQL 9.1 has now reached its End of Life. That means the last maintenance update of 9.1 will be in November 2016. PostgreSQL 9.6 is currently due out in September 2016, so you have a chance to move from PostgreSQL 9.1 to PostgreSQL 9.6. Supported upgrade choices are pg_upgrade pg_dump and pg_restore both of which require downtime, which will increase according to the...

The right answer is of course “Use PostgreSQL”. It’s the main distro and we want you to use that as often as possible. The Postgres-BDR and Postgres-XL projects are also fully open source projects, using the same copyright and licence as the main PostgreSQL project. So if you’re using PostgreSQL, they are also options to consider if you want extended functionality. What does Postgres-BDR do? BDR...

Postgres-BDR has now reached 1.0 production status. Over the last 2 years, Postgres-BDR has been used daily for mission critical production systems. As you might imagine, it’s been improved by both bug fixes and feature enhancements that allow it to be used smoothly, so its mature, robust and feature-rich. The BDR Project introduced logical replication for PostgreSQL, now available as pglogical...

In a recent blog, I described features for PostgreSQL Core that we’ve been working on https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/blog/postgresql-solutions-roadmap/ Many people have asked for a similar roadmap for BDR and Postgres-XL. I can confirm that both are under active development and in active use. Postgres-XL (link) XL 9.5 v1.2 is now available, with more updates coming. XL 9.6 has begun development...

An Uber technical blog of July 2016 described the perception of “many Postgres limitations”. Regrettably, a number of important technical points are either not correct or not wholly correct because they overlook many optimizations in PostgreSQL that were added specifically to address the cases discussed. In most cases, those limitations were actually true in the distant past of 5-10 years ago, so...

At the PostgreSQL developer meeting we discussed putting up everybody’s roadmap projects in one place: http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL10_Roadmap. 2ndQuadrant PostgreSQL Roadmap Projects Logical Replication Use Case: Upgrade Use Case: Partial database replication Aiming for a full and complete implementation for 10.0, allowing other use cases to be supported in later releases. Column...