Let’s assume you have some sensitive data, that you need to protect by encryption. It might be credit card numbers (the usual example), social security numbers, or pretty much anything you consider sensitive. It does not matter if the encryption is mandated by a standard or if you just decided to encrypt the sensitive stuff. You need to do the encryption right and actually protecting the...

UUIDs are a popular identifier data type – they are unpredictable, and/or globally unique (or at least very unlikely to collide) and quite easy to generate. Traditional primary keys based on sequences won’t give you any of that, which makes them unsuitable for public identifiers, and UUIDs solve that pretty naturally. But there are disadvantages too – they may make the access patterns much more...

Two serious security vulnerabilities (code named Meltdown and Spectre) were revealed a couple of weeks ago. Initial tests suggested the performance impact of mitigations (added in the kernel) might be up to ~30% for some workloads, depending on the syscall rate. Those early estimates had to be done quickly, and so were based on limited amounts of testing. Furthermore, the in-kernel fixes evolved...

You probably know that Postgres-XL is a distributed database based on PostgreSQL. A few days ago we pushed the XL 9.6 code into the public git repository. Additional details about the new stuff available in Postgres-XL 9.6 are available here. The topic of this blog post is quite different, though. I’d like to discuss some changes to the project management and development practices, and why (and...

For the last few months, we at 2ndQuadrant have been working on merging PostgreSQL 9.6 into Postgres-XL, which turned out to be quite challenging for various reasons, and took more time than initially planned due to several invasive upstream changes. If you’re interested, look at the official repository here (look at the “master” branch for now). There’s still quite a bit of work to be done –...

Let me discuss a topic that is not inherently PostgreSQL specific, but that I regularly run into while investigating issues on customer systems, evaluating “supportability” of those systems, etc. It’s the importance of having a monitoring solution for system metrics, configuring it reasonably, and why sar is still by far my favorite tool (at least on Linux). On the importance of monitoring Firstly...

A few weeks ago I explained basics of autovacuum tuning. At the end of that post I promised to look into problems with vacuuming soon. Well, it took a bit longer than I planned, but here we go. To quickly recap, autovacuum is a background process cleaning up dead rows, e.g. old deleted row versions. You can also perform the cleanup manually by running VACUUM, but autovacuum does that automatically...

While tweaking postgresql.conf, you might have noticed there’s an option called full_page_writes. The comment next to it says something about partial page writes, and people generally leave it set to on – which is a good thing, as I’ll explain later in this post. It’s however useful to understand what full page writes do, because the impact on performance may be quite significant. Unlike my...

I’ve published multiple benchmarks comparing different PostgreSQL versions, as for example the performance archaeology talk (evaluating PostgreSQL 7.4 up to 9.4), and all those benchmark assumed fixed environment (hardware, kernel, …). Which is fine in many cases (e.g. when evaluating performance impact of a patch), but on production those things do change over time – you get hardware upgrades and...

I had the pleasure to attend PGDay UK last week – a very nice event, hopefully I’ll have the chance to come back next year. There was plenty of interesting talks, but the one that caught my attention in particular was Performace for queries with grouping by Alexey Bashtanov. I have given a fair number of similar performance-oriented talks in the past, so I know how difficult it is to present...