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. […]
A few weeks ago I covered the basics of tuning checkpoints, and in that post I also mentioned that the second common source of performance issues is autovacuum (based on what we see on the mailing list and at our customers under support). So let me follow-up on that with this post about the basics […]
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 […]
On systems doing non-trivial number of writes, tuning checkpoints is crucial for getting good performance. Yet checkpoints are one of the areas where we often identify confusion and configuration issues, both on the community mailing lists and during performance tuning reviews for our customers. (The other one being autovacuum, discussed a few days ago by […]
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 – […]
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 […]
A few days ago I’ve blogged about the common issues with roles and privileges we discover during security reviews. Of course, PostgreSQL offers many advanced security-related features, one of them being Row Level Security (RLS), available since PostgreSQL 9.5. As 9.5 was released in January 2016 (so just a few months ago), RLS is fairly […]
One of the services we offer are security reviews (or audits, if you want), covering a range of areas related to security. It may be a bit surprising, but a topic that often yields the most serious issues is roles and privileges. Perhaps the reason why roles and privileges are a frequent source of issues […]
When teaching PostgreSQL trainings, both on basics and advanced topics, I often find out the attendees have very little idea how powerful the expression indexes may be (if they are aware of them at all). So let me give you a brief overview. So, let’s say we have a table, with a range of timestamps […]
Although in the future most database servers (particularly those handling OLTP-like workloads) will use a flash-based storage, we’re not there yet – flash storage is still considerably more expensive than traditional hard drives, and so many systems use a mix of SSD and HDD drives. That however means we need to decide how to split […]
