Introducing Crunchy Data Warehouse: A next-generation Postgres-native data warehouse. Crunchy Data Warehouse Learn more
Brian Pace
Brian Pace
Postgres' ability to execute queries in parallel is a powerful feature that can significantly improve query performance, especially on large datasets. However, like all resources, parallel workers are finite. When there aren't enough available workers, Postgres may downgrade a parallel query to a serial (non-parallel) execution. This sounds reasonable unless the performance of the downgraded query is well beyond the required response times needed by the application. While helping our clients w...
Read MoreElizabeth Christensen
Elizabeth Christensen
Materialized views are widely used in Postgres today. Many of us are working with using connected systems through foreign data wrappers, separate analytics systems like data warehouses , and merging data from different locations with Postgres queries. Materialized views let you precompile a query or partial table, for both local and remote data. Materialized views are static and have to be refreshed. One of the things that can be really important for using materialized views efficiently is inde...
Read MoreGreg Sabino Mullane
Greg Sabino Mullane
It is rare that a Postgres table keeps the exact same structure year after year. New columns get added. Old columns get dropped. Column data types need to change. Those are all done with the ALTER TABLE command. One big drawback to these changes is that they may force a complete table rewrite. A rewrite means a completely new copy of the table is created, and then the old one is dropped. This can take a very long time for large tables. Worse, everything else is blocked/locked from using the tabl...
Read MorePaul Ramsey
Paul Ramsey
The number of cool things you can do with the http extension is large, but putting those things into production raises an important problem. The amount of time an HTTP request takes, 100s of milliseconds, is 10- to 20-times longer that the amount of time a normal database query takes. This means that potentially an HTTP call could jam up a query for a long time. I recently ran an HTTP function in an update against a relatively small 1000 record table. The query took 5 minutes to run, and durin...
Read MoreGreg Sabino Mullane
Greg Sabino Mullane
The Postgres hackers mailing list ( pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org ) is an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to contribute to the PostgreSQL code. The Postgres project does not use PRs (pull requests) or GitHub issues. So if you want to contribute an idea, or help with code reviews, the hackers mailing list is the canonical way to do so. More information on contributing is on the Postgres wiki at: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/So,_you_want_to_be_a_developer ? My colleague Elizabeth Christ...
Read MoreKeith Fiske
Keith Fiske
Crunchy Data is pleased to announce a new open source pgMonitor Extension . Crunchy Data has worked on a pgMonitor tool for several years as part of our Kubernetes and self-managed Postgres deployments and recently we’ve added an extension to the tool set. Two primary scenarios motivated the creation of the pgMonitor extension : 1. Quicker Metrics : Monitoring metrics often need quick response times to allow for frequent updates. We've noticed that certain metrics become slower as the datab...
Read MoreJesse Soyland
Jesse Soyland
There’s a couple super common Postgres errors you’re likely to encounter while using this database, especially with an application or ORM. One is the PG::DiskFull: ERROR: could not resize shared memory segment. It will look something like this. We see a good amount of support tickets from customers on this topic. If you see this error pass by in your logs. Don’t worry. Seriously. There’s no immediate reason to panic from a single one of these errors. If you’re seeing them regularly or all th...
Read MoreElizabeth Christensen
Elizabeth Christensen
Many folks are surprised to hear that Postgres has parallel queries out of the box. This was released in small batches across a half dozen versions of Postgres, so the major fanfare for having parallelism got a little bit lost. By default Postgres is configured for two parallel workers. The Postgres query planner will assemble a few plans for any given query and will estimate the additional overhead of performing parallel queries, and make a go or no-go decision. Depending on the settings and th...
Read MoreBrian Pace
Brian Pace
In the evolving world of data management, ensuring consistency and accuracy across multiple database systems is paramount. Whether you're migrating data, synchronizing systems, or performing routine audits, the ability to compare data across different database platforms is crucial. Enter pgCompare , an open-source tool designed to simplify and enhance the process of data comparison across PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, and MSSQL databases. The key features of pgCompare: • Multi-Database support : p...
Read MoreGreg Nokes
Greg Nokes
When your company has decided it's time to invest in more open source, Postgres is the obvious choice. Managing databases is not new and you already have established practices and requirements for rolling out a new database. One of the big requirements we frequently help new customers with on their Postgres adoption is data encryption. While the question is simple, there's a few layers to it that determine which is the right approach for you. Here we'll walk through the pros and cons of approach...
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