Ardent Performance Computing
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Postgres Booth at PASS Data Community Summit
PASS Data Community Summit 2025 wrapped up last week. This conference originated 25 years ago with the independent, user-led, not-for-profit “Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS)” and the annual summit in Seattle continues to attract thousands of database professionals each year. After the pandemic it was reorganized and broadened as a “Data Community” event, including … Continue reading
KubeCon 2025: Bookmarks on Memory and Postgres
Just got home from KubeCon. One of my big goals for the trip was to make some progress in a few areas of postgres and kubernetes – primarily around allowing more flexible use of the linux page cache and avoiding OOM kills with less hardware overprovisioning. When I look at Postgres on Kubernetes, I think … Continue reading
Explaining IPC:SyncRep – Postgres Sync Replication is Not Actually Sync Replication
Postgres database-level “synchronous replication” does not actually mean the replication is synchronous. It’s a bit of a lie really. The replication is actually – always – asynchronous. What it actually means is “when the client issues a COMMIT then pause until we know the transaction is replicated.” In fact the primary writer database doesn’t need … Continue reading
Sanitized SQL
A couple times within the past month, I’ve had people send me a message asking if I have any suggestions about where to learn postgres. I like to share the collection of links that I’ve accumulated (and please send me more, if you have good ones!) but another thing I always say is that the … Continue reading
Seattle Postgres User Group Video Library
Are you in the Pacific Northwest? Since January 2024 we’ve been recording the presentations at Seattle Postgres User Group. After some light editing and an opportunity for the speaker to take a final pass, we post them to YouTube. I’m perpetually behind (I do the editing myself) so you won’t find the videos from this … Continue reading
Testing CloudNativePG Preferred Data Durability
This is the third post about running Jepsen against CloudNativePG. Earlier posts: First: shout out to whoever first came up with Oracle Data Guard Protection Modes. Designing it to be explained as a choice between performance, availability and protection was a great idea. Yesterday’s blog post described how the core of all data safety is copies of … Continue reading
Data Safety on a Budget
Many experienced DBAs joke that you can boil down the entire job to a single rule of thumb: Don’t lose your data. It’s simple, memorable, and absolutely true – albeit a little oversimplified. Mark Porter’s Cultural Hint “The Onion of our Requirements” conveys the same idea with a lot more accuracy: We need to always make sure we … Continue reading
Postgres Replication Links
Our platform team has a regular meeting where we often use ops issues as a springboard to dig into Postgres internals. Great meeting today – we ended up talking about the internal architecture of Postgres replication. Sharing a few high-quality links from our discussion: Alexander Kukushkin’s conference talk earlier this year, which includes a great … Continue reading
Losing Data is Harder Than I Expected
This is a follow‑up to the last article: Run Jepsen against CloudNativePG to see sync replication prevent data loss. In that post, we set up a Jepsen lab to make data loss visible when synchronous replication was disabled — and to show that enabling synchronous replication prevents it under crash‑induced failovers. Since then, I’ve been … Continue reading
Run Jepsen against CloudNativePG to see sync replication prevent data loss
Are you in the Pacific Northwest? Want to learn more about topics related to this blog? At 3:15p on Thu Nov 13 in KubeCon Atlanta, I’ll be speaking with Leonardo Cecchi about distributed systems theory applied to standard open source postgres cluster reconfigurations. Jepsen is a testing framework for distributed systems that verifies safety guarantees … Continue reading
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contact: schneider @ ardentperf.com
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