Introducing Crunchy Data Warehouse: A next-generation Postgres-native data warehouse. Crunchy Data Warehouse Learn more
Brian Pace
Brian Pace
The Postgres Write Ahead Log ( WAL ) is a functional component to the database. WAL makes a lot of key functionality possible, like Point-in-Time-Recovery backups , recovering from an event , streaming replication , and more. From time to time, those deep inside the database will need to work directly with WAL files to diagnose or recover . Recently in working with one of Crunchy Data's customers, I came across a situation where understanding the names and sequence numbers was important....
Read MoreCraig Kerstiens
Craig Kerstiens
We spend a lot of time at Crunchy Data helping people dig into the performance of their Postgres. If you're setting up a new Postgres database or already running on in production there are a number of very basic steps you can take that will save your tail in the future when it comes to investigating performance. Here is your guide that'll take less than 5 minutes to get in place. Future you will thank you for doing this today. Pg_stat_statements records and parameterizes queries, how long the...
Read MoreCraig Kerstiens
Craig Kerstiens
A question recently came up in the internal Crunchy Data slack channel: Does anyone actually use enums out in the wild? If you're unfamiliar with enums, they’re enumerated types, a static set of values in a database like days of the week or a shipping status. Enums are a powerful feature of Postgres that allows you to define a set of predefined values that can be assigned to a column. However, enums can have some limitations and drawbacks that make them less than ideal for certain scenarios. L...
Read MoreMatt Hudson
Matt Hudson
The operator has to be in the top-3 SQL-specific operators that people learn, the close competitors are and . Thus, feels familiar when crafting SQL: you can use it with nested SQL statements, or create your own list. But, it does have limitations — what if you wanted to send a list of unknown length? You can’t really use SQL placeholders without also modifying the SQL statement. What if I told you there was a less ubiquitous operator that offered all of the power and less of the drawback...
Read MoreJean-Paul Argudo
Jean-Paul Argudo
With Crunchy Data's focus on Postgres we often talk with people that are looking to reduce their dependency on other databases and modernize their data stack. A big portion of that is migrating and building new apps on Postgres . One common tool in migration from an Oracle database is Orafce which imitates many Oracle functions inside PostgreSQL. Using a tool like Orafce can assist greatly with the migration process. Long term, however, it is likely good practice to slowly refactor your appli...
Read MoreDouglas Hunley
Douglas Hunley
We are excited to announce some big improvements for Crunchy Postgres for you available today. Crunchy Postgres provides everything you need for production ready Postgres in an opinionated distribution built fully on open source, upstream Postgres. Crunchy Postgres powered by our automation provides simple provisioning, backups, high availability, monitoring, and more. Existing Crunchy customers can download this from our Customer Access Portal today. If you’re not using Crunchy Postgres yet...
Read MoreDavid Christensen
David Christensen
At Crunchy we talk a lot about memory, shared buffers, and cache hit ratios. Even our new playground tutorials can help users learn about memory usage. The gist of many of those conversations is that you want to have most of your frequently accessed data in the memory pool closest to the database, the shared buffer cache. There's a lot more to the data flow of an application using Postgres than that. There could be application-level poolers and Redis caches in front of the database. Even on th...
Read MorePaul Ramsey
Paul Ramsey
Ha ha, made you look! This post is not a crazy scam (you be the judge) but just a practical description of using cryptographical algorithms to encrypt and decrypt data inside PostgreSQL. There's already a lot of encryption in Crunchy Bridge ! First, your data are "encrypted at rest". That means that the "volumes" (what in an earlier era would be called the disk drives) your data is saved to are encrypted. Also all the backup files generated by your server are encrypted. In practice, this means...
Read MoreJesse Soyland
Jesse Soyland
At Crunchy Data we spend a lot of time helping customers migrate their databases. Migrating Postgres tends to be a very straightforward process. Yet there can still be a few gotchas that can catch you off-guard if you are not prepared to deal with them. From some recent experiences with customers migrating to Crunchy Bridge we found most customers had not considered the underlying collations. These customers ran a risk of data corruption by not handling collation review and updates as part of...
Read MoreDavid Christensen
David Christensen
When using monitoring tools like PgMonitor or pganalyze , Crunchy clients will often ask me about high numbers of locks and when to worry. Like most engineering-related questions, the answer is: "it depends". In this post, I will provide a little more information about locks, how they are used in PostgreSQL, and what things to look for to spot problems vs high usage. PostgreSQL uses locks in all parts of its operation to serialize or share access to key data. This can come in the form of two...
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