Ardent Performance Computing
database
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
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
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
This Week in PostgreSQL – May 31
Since last October I’ve been periodically writing up summaries of interesting content I see on the internet related to PostgreSQL (generally blog posts). My original motivation was just to learn more about PostgreSQL – but I’ve started sharing them with a few colleagues and received positive feedback. Thought I’d try posting one of these digests … 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
Patching Time
Just a quick note to point out that the October PSU was just released. The database has a few more vulnerabilities than usual (31), but they are mostly related to Java and the high CVSS score of 9 only applies to people running Oracle on windows. (On other operating systems, the highest score is 6.5.) … Continue reading
OSP #2c: Build a Standard Platform from the Bottom-Up
This is the fourth of twelve articles in a series called Operationally Scalable Practices. The first article gives an introduction and the second article contains a general overview. In short, this series suggests a comprehensive and cogent blueprint to best position organizations and DBAs for growth. This article – building a standard platform – has … Continue reading
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contact: schneider @ ardentperf.com
Ardent Performance Computing 
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