Greg's PlanetPostgreSQL Archives - 2ndQuadrant

Planetary alignment

June 30, 2011/0 Comments/in Greg's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL /by 2ndQuadrant Press

Picking back up this week’s theme of where you can publicize your PostgreSQL related project at, you’re probably reading this blog entry because it appeared on the Planet PostgreSQL blog aggregator. There are “Planet” feeds around many open-source projects. The Debian and GNOME ones spawned off the Planet software, which now powers a ton of […]

The cost of free PostgreSQL publicity

June 27, 2011/0 Comments/in Greg's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL, United States News /by 2ndQuadrant Press

The software license PostgreSQL is released under makes it extremely friendly to businesses who would like to use the database in commercial products. Partly as a result of this, a significant amount of PostgreSQL development is donated by companies who sell products derived from the database (even entire forks of the source code). Normally this […]

PostGIS In Action

April 29, 2011/0 Comments/in Greg's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL /by 2ndQuadrant Press

I doubt many people can tell you exactly when the first time they read a map was. Mine was memorable though. Circa 3rd grade, I went through the usual battery of standardized tests for the first time, which included map reading. I did pretty bad, which was odd because it was the only section I […]

Intel SSD, now off the sh..err, shamed list

April 9, 2011/1 Comment/in Greg's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL, United States News /by 2ndQuadrant Press

I already did the long conference entry here, so just a quick update: slides from PGEast are posted and next week I’ll be at the increasingly misnamed MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, California. One thing I’m known for now is ranting about cheap Solid State Drives and how they suck for database use. The Reliable […]

Spring 2011 PostgreSQL Conferences, US/Canada

March 7, 2011/1 Comment/in Greg's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL, United States News /by 2ndQuadrant Press

This week’s water falling from the skies isn’t turning into snow. And on days when it’s clear, my car is covered with tree pollen. While they means something different to most people, to me these are the signs that the spring conference season is about to start. There’s a conference in North America during each […]

Linux filesystems and PostgreSQL checkpoint benchmarks

February 18, 2011/0 Comments/in Greg's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL, United States News /by 2ndQuadrant Press

Following up on last month’s Tuning Linux for low PostgreSQL Latency, there’s now been a giant pile of testing done on two filesystems, three patches, and two sets of kernel tuning parameters run. The result so far is some interesting new data, and one more committed improvements in this area that are in PostgreSQL 9.1 […]

Data generation and hardware quality

February 12, 2011/0 Comments/in Greg's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL, United States News /by 2ndQuadrant Press

One of the challenges when dealing with a new database design is that you don’t know things like how big the tables will end up being until they’re actually populated with a fair amount of data. But if the design has to factor in the eventual scalability concerns, you can’t deploy it to obtain that […]

Hinting at PostgreSQL

February 5, 2011/8 Comments/in Greg's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL, United States News /by 2ndQuadrant Press

This week’s flame war on the pgsql-performance list once again revolves around the fact that PostgreSQL doesn’t have the traditional hint syntax available in other databases. There are a mix of technical and pragmatic reasons behind why that is: Introducing hints is a common source of later problems, because fixing a query place once in […]

Tuning Linux for low PostgreSQL latency

January 28, 2011/2 Comments/in Greg's PlanetPostgreSQL, United States News /by 2ndQuadrant Press

One of the ugly parts of Linux with PostgreSQL is that the OS will happily cache up to around 5% of memory before getting aggressive about writing it out. I’ve just updated a long list of pgbench runs showing how badly that can turn out, even on a server with a modest 16GB of RAM. […]

Reducing the postgresql.conf, parameter at a time

January 27, 2011/0 Comments/in Greg's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL, United States News /by 2ndQuadrant Press

One of the more useful bits of PostgreSQL documentation I ever worked on is Tuning Your PostgreSQL Server. When that was written in the summer of 2008, a few months after the release of PostgreSQL 8.3, it was hard to find any similar guide that was both (relatively) concise and current. Since then, myself and […]