Welcome to the third – and last – part of this blog series, exploring how the PostgreSQL performance evolved over the years. The first part looked at OLTP workloads, represented by pgbench tests. The second part looked at analytical / BI queries, using a subset of the traditional TPC-H benchmark (essentially a portion of the […]
In the first part of this blog series, I’ve presented a couple of benchmark results showing how PostgreSQL OLTP performance changed since 8.3, released in 2008. In this part I plan to do the same thing but for analytical / BI queries, processing large amounts of data. There’s a number of industry benchmarks for testing […]
A couple years ago (at the pgconf.eu 2014 in Madrid) I presented a talk called “Performance Archaeology” which showed how performance changed in recent PostgreSQL releases. I did that talk as I think the long-term view is interesting and may give us insights that may be very valuable. For people who actually work on PostgreSQL […]
After I shared the sequential UUID benchmarks a couple of weeks ago, one of the points raised in feedback was the choice of the storage space. I’ve intentionally used a fairly weak storage system (RAID10 on three 7.2k SATA drives) because I wanted to demonstrate the benefits. But a couple of readers suggested using SSDs might significantly reduce […]
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 like PCI DSS or if you just decided to encrypt […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
