March 12 | PGConf.Online 2021 wrap-up: 57 talks, 30 international speakers, 2000+ registrants!

PGConf.Online wrapped up 10 days ago, and we want to share some important stats with you. We were glad to have welcomed 2000+ registrants this year with 700-900 of them joining us online each day! The total attendance/registration rate for all three days was near 75%, which is amazing!

March 8 | Celebrating Women Who Code in Postgres Pro

In early March, before International Women’s Day, we asked our female tech professionals a few questions and were surprised by some of them providing us answers :) Let’s celebrate women who code working here at Postgres Pro and have a look at what they are up to!

February 18 | Postgres Professional is now sponsoring Psycopg development!

Postgres Professional has become one of the main sponsors backing the development of the Psycopg library, the most popular PostgreSQL adapter for the Python programming language.

February 3 | Postgres Professional at FOSDEM 2021

It’s this time of the year again, and FOSDEM is coming! In 2021, Postgres Professional is really well-represented in the PostgreSQL devroom, as we have 5 talks accepted by the Committee. Let’s take a look at all presentations to be given by our team at this conference.

June 17 | Locks in PostgreSQL: 1. Relation-level locks

The previous two series of articles covered isolation and multiversion concurrency control and logging.

In this series, we will discuss locks.

This series will consist of four articles:

1. Relation-level locks (this article).
2. Row-level locks.
3. Locks on other objects and predicate locks.
4. Locks in RAM.

The material of all the articles is based on training courses on administration that Pavel Luzanov and I are creating (mostly in Russian, although one course is available in English), but does not repeat them verbatim and is intended for careful reading and self-experimenting.

Many thanks to Elena Indrupskaya for the translation of these articles into English.

General information on locks

PostgreSQL has a wide variety of techniques that serve to lock something (or are at least called so). Therefore, I will first explain in the most general terms why locks are needed at all, what kinds of them are available and how they differ from one another. Then we will figure out what of this variety is used in PostgreSQL and only after that we will start discussing different kinds of locks in detail.

...

June 3 | PostgreSQL performance issue investigation with pg_profile

In this blog post, we're explaining to those new to pg_profile why you might need this PostgreSQL extension in your daily work, on a real-world example.

May 13 | WAL in PostgreSQL: 4. Setup and Tuning

So, we got acquainted with the structure of the buffer cache and in this context concluded that if all the RAM contents got lost due to failure, the write-ahead log (WAL) was required to recover. The size of the necessary WAL files and the recovery time are limited thanks to the checkpoint performed from time to time.

In the previous articles we already reviewed quite a few important settings that anyway relate to WAL. In this article (being the last in this series) we will discuss problems of WAL setup that are unaddressed yet: WAL levels and their purpose, as well as the reliability and performance of write-ahead logging.

WAL levels

The main WAL task is to ensure recovery after a failure. But once we have to maintain the log anyway, we can also adapt it to other tasks by adding some more information to it. There are several logging levels. The wal_level parameter specifies the level, and each next level includes everything that gets into WAL of the preceding level plus something new.

...

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.

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.

pg_variables

Functions for defining and using variables in client sessions.

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.

Page-level data compression

PGLZ compression of individual values is used now in PostgreSQL. That’s good, but sometimes it’s possible to achieve significant compression only when compressing multiple values together. This is why we’re considering page-level data compression.

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.

Multi-master cluster with sharding

Multi-master cluster with sharding which provides read/write scalability as well as high availability is obviously one of most wanted DBMS features. Experience shows that we should move in step-by-step manner in order to have it in core one day. Postgres Professional company joins community efforts in this direction.