Ardent Performance Computing
PostgreSQL
Misc Learnings: SBOMs, Provenance and Attestations
In the past couple weeks, I’ve learned more about renovate, SBOMs, provenance and attestations than I ever wanted to know. (But if I’m being honest, I do enjoy learning a bit more about it.) Backstory is that I decided to make CNPG-Extensions an actually serious project. The original name was “Not-CNPG” as a joke about … Continue reading
Happiness Hint: Alarm on Checkpoint Time
Before starting, I want to put a few things at the top: You probably should not change the checkpoint_timeout setting from its default of 5 minutes. Users who read tuning advice on the internet (or get bad AI advice) about increasing this setting usually don’t understand the risk and significance of trading for RTO/availability. Let’s … Continue reading
Zero autovacuum_vacuum_cost_delay, Write Storms, and You
A few days ago, Shaun Thomas published an article over on the pgEdge blog called [Checkpoints, Write Storms, and You]. I left a few comments [on LinkedIn]. This article is a great technical read about an important and overlooked topic – and I always love seeing real test results to illustrate the details. I don’t … Continue reading
Database Schema Migrations in 2026 – Survey
What is the best way to manage database schema migrations in 2026? Since this sort of thing is getting easier with AI tooling, I spent some time doing a survey across a bunch of recognizable multi-contributor open source projects to see how they do database schema change management. Biggest takeaway: the framework provided by your … Continue reading
Postgres client_connection_check_interval
Saw this post on LinkedIn yesterday: I also somehow missed this setting for years. And it’s crazy timing, because it’s right after I published a blog about seeing the exact problem this solves. In my blog post I mentioned “unexpected behaviors (bugs?) in… Postgres itself.” Turns out Postgres already has the fix; it’s just disabled … 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? Thursday Nov 6 at 6pm Bohan Zhang – a member of the technical staff at OpenAI – is returning to speak again at the Seattle Postgres User Group! This time, Bohan will be talking about how OpenAI runs Postgres – challenges faced, lessons learned from outages, and strategies implemented … Continue reading
Graviton2 versus Graviton4
Just a short post, because I thought this was pretty remarkable. Below, I have screenshots showing the CPU utilization of two AWS instances in us-west-2 which are running an identical workload. They are running the CloudNativePG playground, which is a production-like learning and testing environment (all running virtually inside the single ec2 instance, which can … Continue reading
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contact: schneider @ ardentperf.com
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