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Last time we got acquainted with the structure of an important component of the shared memory — the buffer cache. A risk of losing information from RAM is the main reason why we need techniques to recover data after failure. Now we will discuss these techniques.

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 covered different vacuuming techniques: in-page vacuum (along with HOT updates), vacuum and autovacuum.

Now we've reached the last topic of this series. We will talk on the transaction id wraparound and freezing.

Transaction ID wraparound

PostgreSQL uses 32-bit transaction IDs. This is a pretty large number (about 4 billion), but with intensive work of the server, this number is not unlikely to get exhausted. For example: with the workload of 1000 transactions a second, this will happen as early as in one month and a half of continuous work.

But we've mentioned that multiversion concurrency control relies on the sequential numbering, which means that of two transactions the one with a smaller number can be considered to have started earlier. Therefore, it is clear that it is not an option to just reset the counter and start the numbering from scratch.

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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!

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!

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

To get things done before 2020 is over, I decided to publish my blog post with answers to your questions from our webinar on PostgreSQL 13 that we hosted in October. I’m still looking into release 13 and will soon give another talk on PG13 monitoring-related features that became available in this version of PostgreSQL. For now, let’s go through the webinar questions.

After having discussed isolation problems and having made a digression regarding the low-level data structure, last time we explored row versions and observed how different operations changed tuple header fields.

Now we will look at how consistent data snapshots are obtained from tuples.

What is a data snapshot?

Data pages can physically contain several versions of the same row. But each transaction must see only one (or none) version of each row, so that all of them make up a consistent picture of the data (in the sense of ACID) as of a certain point in time.

Isolation in PosgreSQL is based on snapshots: each transaction works with its own data snapshot, which "contains" data that were committed before the moment the snapshot was created and does not "contain" data that were not committed by that moment yet. We've already seen that although the resulting isolation appears stricter than required by the standard, it still has anomalies.

This blog post is written as a follow-up for the “Roadmap for JSON in PostgreSQL” webinar with Oleg Bartunov that we hosted in September. It took us a while to finally tackle these questions, but the proverb says ‘better late than never’.

Last year, the popular monitoring service Zabbix introduced Agent 2, designed to reduce the number of TCP connections and provide convenient extendability through plugins in Golang. In this article, I will discuss the main features of Zabbix Agent 2 plugin for monitoring PostgreSQL,  give tips on how to configure it and explain by example how to customize the plugin.