On Sunday 15 June 2008 22:31:59 ITAGAKI Takahiro wrote:
> Robert Treat <xzilla@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> > On Friday 13 June 2008 12:58:22 Josh Berkus wrote:
> > > I can see how this would be useful, but I can also see that it could be
> > > a huge performance burden when activated. So it couldn't be part of
> > > the standard statistics collection.
> >
> > A lower overhead way to get at this type of information is to quantize
> > dtrace results over a specific period of time. Much nicer than doing the
> > whole logging/analyze piece.
>
> DTrace is disabled in most installation as default, and cannot be used in
> some platforms (especially I want to use the feature in Linux). I think
> DTrace is known as a tool for developers, but not for DBAs. However,
> statement logging is required by DBAs who used to use STATSPACK in Oracle.
>
>
For some reason it has gotten that reputation in this community, but that
really is not the case. As Sun describes it, dtrace "provides a powerful
infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to
concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating
system and user programs". Given that PostgreSQL relies on the operating
system for a majority of it's instermentation (ie. we have nothing like v$
tables in oracle), we should really be thinking of dtrace as the ultimate
tool for DBA's to figure out what is going on in thier systems.
--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter LAMP :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL
