Ardent Performance Computing
PostgreSQL
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 Performance Puzzle
Update 7/18: y’all guessed the answer to my puzzle very fast! At the bottom of this blog post, I’ve added the expressions that I used (with credit to those who guessed it), and also other expressions guessed by readers which exhibited similar behavior. I’ll do another follow-up blog post touching on several layers of this … Continue reading
A Hairy PostgreSQL Incident
It was 5:17pm today, just as I was wrapping up work for the day, and my manager pinged me with the following chat: <manager>: Hi Jeremy – we have a <other team> ticket – escalated to <leader>, <leader>, etc. <principal> is on trying to advise as well. Are you available this evening if needed for … Continue reading
PostgreSQL Logical Replicas and Snapshots: Proceed Carefully
Earlier this year, Christos Christoudias – an Engineer from Instacart – published an article on Medium about Creating a Logical Replica from a Snapshot in RDS Postgres. Recently I’ve seen discussions about this article a few times, in a few different places. Is it safe? Is it ok to do this? A little under a … Continue reading
Paranoid SQL Execution on Postgres
Suppose that you want to be completely over-the-top paranoid about making sure that when you execute some particular SQL statement on your Postgres database, you’re doing it in the safest and least risky way? For example, suppose it’s the production database behind your successful startup’s main commercial website. If anything even causes queries to block/pause … 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
Seattle PostgreSQL Meetup This Thursday: New Location
I’m looking forward to the Seattle PostgreSQL User Group meetup this Thursday (June 20, 2019) at 5:30pm! We’re going to get an early sneak peek at what’s coming later this year in PostgreSQL’s next major release. The current velocity of development in this open source community is staggering and this is an exciting and valuable … Continue reading
PostgresConf 2019 Summary
PostgresConf 2019 in New York City is a wrap! Now that I’ve had a few days to recover a little brain capacity, I think I’m ready to attempt a summary. I love conferences for the learning opportunities… inside of sessions and also outside of them. Being the largest PostgreSQL-centered conference in the United States, PostgresConf … Continue reading
PostgresConf 2019 Training Days
It feels like PostgresConf in New York is in full swing, even though the main tracks haven’t even started yet! (Oh, and by the way, as of this morning I heard there are still day-passes available for those who haven’t yet registered for the conference… and then you can come hear a great session about … Continue reading
Column And Table Redefinition With Minimal Locking
TLDR: Note to future self… (1) Read this before you modify a table on a live PostgreSQL database. If you do it wrong then your app might totally hang. There is a right way to do it which avoids that. (2) Especially remember the lock_timeout step. Many blog posts around the ‘net are missing this … Continue reading
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contact: schneider @ ardentperf.com
Ardent Performance Computing 
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