May 2 | pg_probackup 2.3.0 has been released

A new version of pg_probackup, a backup tool developed by Postgres Pro team, has been released

February 22, 2017 | Postgres Pro Standard 9.6.2.1 released

Postgres Pro Standard 9.6.2.1 has been released today. It is based on PostgreSQL 9.6.2 and contains the new upstream fixes and Postgres Pro extensions updates, including pg_pathman, pg_probackup and sr_plan.

July 29, 2016 | Leonid Libkin from the University of Edinburgh will give a talk "Making SQL Queries Correct on Databases with Nulls" 9 August at 14:00

What is the scientifically correct way if using NULLs  ?

April 12, 2016 | ora2pg improved by 45%

Gilles Darold from the french company Dalibo, the ora2pg author, has blogged that the performance improvement given by the Svetlana's patch can be as high as 45%.

September 24 | Indexes in PostgreSQL — 8 (RUM)

We have already discussed PostgreSQL indexing engine, the interface of access methods, and main access methods, such as: hash indexes, B-trees, GiST, SP-GiST, and GIN. In this article, we will watch how gin turns into rum.

RUM

Although the authors claim that gin is a powerful genie, the theme of drinks has eventually won: next-generation GIN has been called RUM.

This access method expands the concept that underlies GIN and enables us to perform full-text search even faster. In this series of articles, this is the only method that is not included in a standard PostgreSQL delivery and is an external extension. Several installation options are available for it:

• Take "yum" or "apt" package from the PGDG repository. For example, if you installed PostgreSQL from "postgresql-10" package, also install "postgresql-10-rum".
• Build from source code on github and install on your own (the instruction is there as well).
• Use as a part of Postgres Pro Enterprise (or at least read the documentation from there).

Limitations of GIN

What limitations of GIN does RUM enable us to transcend?

First, "tsvector" data type contains not only lexemes, but also information on their positions inside the document. As we observed last time, GIN index does not store this information. For this reason, operations to search for phrases, which appeared in version 9.6, are supported by GIN index inefficiently and have to access the original data for recheck.

Second, search systems usually return the results sorted by relevance (whatever that means). We can use ranking functions "ts_rank" and "ts_rank_cd" to this end, but they have to be computed for each row of the result, which is certainly slow.

To a first approximation, RUM access method can be considered as GIN that additionally stores position information and can return the results in a needed order (like GiST can return nearest neighbors). Let's move step by step.

September 17 | Indexes in PostgreSQL — 7 (GIN)

We have already got acquainted with PostgreSQL indexing engine and the interface of access methods and discussed hash indexes, B-trees, as well as GiST and SP-GiST indexes. And this article will feature GIN index.

GIN

"Gin?.. Gin is, it seems, such an American liquor?.."
"I'm not a drink, oh, inquisitive boy!" again the old man flared up, again he realized himself and again took himself in hand. "I am not a drink, but a powerful and undaunted spirit, and there is no such magic in the world that I would not be able to do."
— Lazar Lagin, "Old Khottabych".

Gin stands for Generalized Inverted Index and should be considered as a genie, not a drink.
— README

General concept

GIN is the abbreviated Generalized Inverted Index. This is a so-called inverted index. It manipulates data types whose values are not atomic, but consist of elements. We will call these types compound. And these are not the values that get indexed, but individual elements; each element references the values in which it occurs.

A good analogy to this method is the index at the end of a book, which for each term, provides a list of pages where this term occurs. The access method must ensure fast search of indexed elements, just like the index in a book. Therefore, these elements are stored as a familiar B-tree (a different, simpler, implementation is used for it, but it does not matter in this case). An ordered set of references to table rows that contain compound values with the element is linked to each element. Orderliness is inessential for data retrieval (the sort order of TIDs does not mean much), but important for the internal structure of the index.

September 15 | Storing arbitrary PostgreSQL data types in JSONB

Last month Alvaro Hernandez-Tortosa published a blog post discussing how the existing JSON features in PostgreSQL can be improved. The main request was about increasing the number of data types supported in JSONB. We addressed this concern and are ready to share our development team’s commentary.

JsQuery

JsQuery – is a language to query jsonb data type, introduced in PostgreSQL release 9.4. It's primary goal is to provide an additional functionality to jsonb (currently missing in PostgreSQL), such as a simple and effective way to search in nested objects and arrays, more comparison operators with indexes support.

pg_variables

Functions for defining and using variables in client sessions.

pg_probackup

Pg_probackup is a utility to manage backup and recovery of PostgreSQL database clusters. It is designed to perform periodic backups of the PostgreSQL instance that enable you to restore the server in case of a failure.

mamonsu

An active monitoring agent for Postgres Pro. Based on zabbix, mamonsu provides an extensible cross-platform solution that can collect and visualize multiple Postgres Pro and system metrics.

Backup

We work on several backup problems: block-level incremental backup, backup validation, partial backup/restore.

Connection pooling

Working with large number of simultaneous connections almost inevitably leads to usage of connection pools. Unfortunately, present pooling solutions are very limited in access to all PostgreSQL features.

Pluggable storages

We achieved a significant progress in PostgreSQL extendability: FDWs, custom access methods, generic WAL. And we’re not so far from having pluggable storage engines. Concept of API was presented at PGCon 2016.