Ardent Performance Computing
Linux
Collation Torture Test versus Debian
Collation torture test results are finally finished and uploaded for Debian. https://github.com/ardentperf/glibc-unicode-sorting The test did not pick up any changes in en_US sort order for either Bullseye or Bookworm 🎉️ Buster has glibc 2.28 so it shows lots of changes – as expected. The postgres wiki had claimed that Jessie(8) to Stretch(9) upgrades were safe. … Continue reading
Challenges of Postgres Containers
Many enterprise workloads are being migrated from commercial databases like Oracle and SQL Server to Postgres, which brings anxiety and challenges for mature operational teams. Learning a new database like Postgres sounds intimidating. In practice, most of the concepts directly transfer from databases like SQL Server and Oracle. Transactions, SQL syntax, explain plans, connection management, … Continue reading
Kubernetes Requests and Limits for Postgres
As Joe Drumgoole said a few days ago: so many Postgres providers. Aiven, AWS, Azure, Crunchy, DigitalOcean, EDB, GCP, Heroku, Neon, Nile, Oracle, Supabase, Tembo, Timescale, Xata, Yugabyte… 🤯 I’m sure there’s more I missed. And that’s not even the providers using Postgres underneath services they offer with a different focus than Postgres compatibility. (I … Continue reading
Copy-and-Paste A New Postgres Dev Env In 5 Min
You can cut-and-paste the following commands to quickly get a new & clean dev environment for working with PostgreSQL source code. This includes Michael Paquier’s powerful script kit for managing the PostgreSQL development environment. Setting up from scratch takes me about 5 minutes, plus 3 minutes to configure, compile and install PostgreSQL for testing. Running the … Continue reading
Did Postgres Lose My Data?
Hello, let me introduce myself. Today, we’ll pretend that I’m a linguistics researcher. I don’t know much about databases, but I do know a lot about the Balti language of northern Pakistan. That’s why I’m excited about my current translation project. The most interesting part of this translation project is that I’m doing some computer-driven … Continue reading
Researching the Performance Puzzle
The PostgreSQL Performance Puzzle was, perhaps, too easy – it didn’t take long for someone to guess the correct answer! But I didn’t see much discussion about why the difference or what was happening. My emphasis on the magnitude of the difference was a tip-off that there’s much more than meets the eye with this … Continue reading
PostgreSQL Invalid Page and Checksum Verification Failed
At the Seattle PostgreSQL User Group meetup this past Tuesday, we got onto the topic of invalid pages in PostgreSQL. It was a fun discussion and it made me realize that it’d be worth writing down a bunch of the stuff we talked about – it might be interesting to a few more people too! … Continue reading
Understanding CPU on AIX Power SMT Systems
This month I worked with a chicagoland company to improve performance for eBusiness Suite on AIX. I’ve worked with databases running on AIX a number of times over the years now. Nevertheless, I got thrown for a loop this week. TLDR: In the end, it came down to a fundamental change in resource accounting that … Continue reading
Lessons from Africa, Part 2
Last week was busy… making travel arrangements for this week’s trip to New York (technically Jersey) and some light analysis of AWR reports from exadata RAT runs and some heavy troubleshooting of a Solaris x86 RAC cluster with random node reboots. (I think I finally traced the node reboots to a kernel CPU/scheduling problem). I … Continue reading
Lessons From Rural Africa
It has been nine months since I’ve written here. Needless to say, a lot has happened! First, my family was living in Africa for three months earlier this year while I did some tech work at an NGO hospital. Second, upon our return I decided to join the good people at Pythian. I’m not moving … Continue reading
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contact: schneider @ ardentperf.com
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