Craig's PlanetPostgreSQL Archives - 2ndQuadrant

Failover slots for PostgreSQL

June 8, 2020/8 Comments/in Craig's PlanetPostgreSQL /by craig.ringer

Logical decoding and logical replication is getting more attention in the PostgreSQL world. This means we need it working well alongside production HA systems – and it turns out there’s a problem there. Replication slots are not themselves synced to physical replicas so you can’t continue to use a slot after a master failure results […]

A convenient way to launch psql against postgres while running pg_regress

October 10, 2019/0 Comments/in Craig's PlanetPostgreSQL /by craig.ringer

I got tired of looking up regression_output/log/postmaster.log to find the PGSOCKET to use to connect to a running pg_regress‘s temp-install postgres so I wrote a little shell function for it. My patch to print a connst in pg_regress never got merged so I needed a workaround. I’m sure I’m not the only one, so here’s […]

Developing on many versions of PostgreSQL at once

August 19, 2019/0 Comments/in Craig's PlanetPostgreSQL /by craig.ringer

In a developer’s ideal world there’s only one stable and one development version of the product. Everyone updates immediately to the next stable version and nobody cares about anything older. As far as I can tell this has never actually happened, ever, in the history of anything. Working on many versions PostgreSQL is a mature […]

Using Docker Hub PostgreSQL images

May 17, 2019/2 Comments/in Craig's PlanetPostgreSQL /by craig.ringer

Docker Hub carries Docker images for PostgreSQL, based on Debian Stretch or Alpine Linux. These are not official PostgreSQL Development Group (PGDG) images from postgresql.org, they’re maintained in the Docker Library on Github. But as Docker adoption grows these are going to become more and more people’s first exposure to PostgreSQL. I tried these images […]

Dev Corner: error context stack corruption

February 23, 2018/4 Comments/in Craig's PlanetPostgreSQL /by craig.ringer

PostgreSQL uses error context callbacks to allow code paths to annotate errors with additional information. For example, pl/pgsql uses them to add a CONTEXT message reporting the procedure that was executing at the time of the error. But if you get it wrong when you use one in an extension or a patch to core, […]

Using Multimaster and BDR appropriately – LinuxConfAu

February 1, 2018/2 Comments/in Craig's PlanetPostgreSQL /by craig.ringer

Unless you were in Sydney for linux.conf.au 2018 last week you probably didn’t see my talk Geographically distributed multi-master replication with PostgreSQL and BDR. Luckily for you it’s on archive.org and YouTube. If you’re interested in multi-master replication of any sort, even non-PostgreSQL-based multi-master, it should be worth taking a look. The talk could’ve been […]

Plan for the unexpected: install diagnostic tools on your PostgreSQL servers

October 16, 2017/0 Comments/in Craig's PlanetPostgreSQL /by craig.ringer

There’s a lot of information out there on how to configure PostgreSQL, on the importance of backups and testing them, etc. But what about the server you run PostgreSQL on? We tend to pay a lot less attention to tools that you won’t need unless something breaks. But it’s worth taking some time to do […]

Transaction traceability in PostgreSQL 10 with txid_status(…)

September 26, 2017/1 Comment/in Craig's PlanetPostgreSQL /by craig.ringer

One feature quietly added to PostgreSQL 10 is the ability to determine the commit status of any transaction by transaction-id. It’s reasonable to wonder why you’d want this, since you know if you committed the transaction, it’s still in progress, or if you or rolled it back. And you can check for in-progress transactions in […]

Using the PostgreSQL TAP framework in extensions

April 10, 2017/3 Comments/in Craig's PlanetPostgreSQL /by craig.ringer

Support for using the TAP protocol to run extended regression tests was added to PostgreSQL back in 9.4 with the adoption of Perl’s prove tool and Test::More to test initdb, pg_basebackup, etc. Since then the TAP-based tests have been greatly expanded, particularly with the advent of the src/test/recovery tests and the PostgresNode module in PostgreSQL […]

Traceable commit for PostgreSQL 10

April 5, 2017/0 Comments/in Craig's PlanetPostgreSQL /by craig.ringer

PostgreSQL 10 now supports finding out the status of a recent transaction for recovery after network connection loss or crash.

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