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.

January 12 | Postgres Pro Standard 13.1.1 Now Available

Postgres Pro Standard 13.1.1 was released by the Postgres Professional team on December 18, 2020. This release is based on the corresponding version of the upstream PostgreSQL DBMS and includes a number of enhancements listed in this announcement.

May 2, 2020 | 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 9 | MVCC in PostgreSQL — 7. Autovacuum

To remind you, we started with problems related to isolation, made a digression about low-level data structure, discussed row versions in detail and observed how data snapshots are obtained from row versions.

Then we explored in-page vacuum (and HOT updates) and vacuum. Now we'll look into autovacuum.

Autovacuum

We've already mentioned that normally (i. e., when nothing holds the transaction horizon for a long time) VACUUM usually does its job. The problem is how often to call it.

If we vacuum a changing table too rarely, its size will grow more than desired. Besides, a next vacuum operation may require several passes through indexes if too many changes were done.

If we vacuum the table too often, the server will constantly do maintenance rather than useful work — and this is no good either.

Note that launching VACUUM on schedule by no means resolves the issue because the workload can change with time. If the table starts to change more intensively, it must be vacuumed more often.

Autovacuum is exactly the technique that enables us to launch vacuuming depending on how intensive the table changes are.

...

January 18 | MVCC in PostgreSQL — 6. Vacuum

We started with problems related to isolation, made a digression about low-level data structure, then discussed row versions and observed how data snapshots are obtained from row versions.

Last time we talked about HOT updates and in-page vacuuming, and today we'll proceed to a well-known vacuum vulgaris. Really, so much has already been written about it that I can hardly add anything new, but the beauty of a full picture requires sacrifice. So keep patience.

Vacuum

What does vacuum do?

In-page vacuum works fast, but frees only part of the space. It works within one table page and does not touch indexes.

The basic, "normal" vacuum is done using the VACUUM command, and we will call it just "vacuum" (leaving "autovacuum" for a separate discussion).

So, vacuum processes the entire table. It vacuums away not only dead tuples, but also references to them from all indexes.

Vacuuming is concurrent with other activities in the system. The table and indexes can be used in a regular way both for reads and updates (however, concurrent execution of commands such as CREATE INDEX, ALTER TABLE and some others is impossible).

Only those table pages are looked through where some activities took place. To detect them, the visibility map is used (to remind you, the map tracks those pages that contain pretty old tuples, which are visible in all data snapshots for sure). Only those pages are processed that are not tracked by the visibility map, and the map itself gets updated.

The free space map also gets updated in the process to reflect the extra free space in the pages.

...

December 18, 2020 | MVCC in PostgreSQL — 5. In-page vacuum and HOT updates

Just to remind you, we already discussed issues related to isolation, made a digression regarding low-level data structure, and then explored row versions and observed how data snapshots are obtained from row versions.

Now we will proceed to two closely connected problems: in-page vacuum и HOT updates. Both techniques can be referred to optimizations; they are important, but virtually not covered in the documentation.

In-page vacuum during regular updates

When accessing a page for either an update or read, if PostgreSQL understands that the page is running out of space, it can do a fast in-page vacuum. This happens in either of the cases:

1. A previous update in this page did not find enough space to allocate a new row version in the same page. Such a situation is remembered in the page header, and next time the page is vacuumed.
2. The page is more than fillfactor percent full. In this case, vacuum is performed right away without putting off till next time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Adaptive query planning

We develop new algorithms to make the query plans better.

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.