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Jonathan S. Katz
Jonathan S. Katz
My professional background has been in application development with a strong affinity for developing with PostgreSQL (which I hope comes through in previous articles ). However, in many of my roles, I found myself as the "accidental" systems administrator, where I would troubleshoot issues in production and do my best to keep things running and safe. When it came to monitoring my Postgres databases, I initially took what I knew about monitoring a web application itself, i.e. looking at CPU, m...
Read MoreJonathan S. Katz
Jonathan S. Katz
You don't need monitoring until you need it. But if you're running anything in production, you always need it. This is particularly true if you are managing databases. You need to be able to answer questions like "am I running out of disk?" or "why does my application have degraded performance?" to be able to troubleshoot or mitigate problems before they occur. When I first made a foray into how to monitor PostgreSQL in Kubernetes , let alone in a containerized environment, I learned that a l...
Read MoreDavid Youatt
David Youatt
PostgreSQL has supported streaming replication and hot standbys since version 9.0 (2010), and synchronous replication since version 9.1 (2011). Streaming replication (and in this case we're referring to "binary" streaming replication, not "logical") sends the PostgreSQL WAL stream over a network connection from primary to a replica. By default, streaming replication is asynchronous: the primary does not wait for a replica to indicate that it wrote the data. With synchronous replication, the...
Read MoreGreg Smith
Greg Smith
PostgreSQL 13 was released last week. I'm excited about this one, as the more mature partitioning plus logical replication features allow some long-requested deployment architectures. I ran 13 through my usual 144 test quick spin to see if everything was working as expected. Mainly boring stuff, but I was pleased to see that with the simple 128 client/4X RAM benchmark workload, Postgres 13 is driving 1.6GB/s of random read traffic requests to my PCI-e 4.0 NVM-e SSD. It keeps up with a whole RAI...
Read MoreJonathan S. Katz
Jonathan S. Katz
PostgreSQL 13 is a lucky release ! There are some very impactful new features and the release is coming out at its regularly scheduled time in the fall. One of my favorite parts around the PostgreSQL release process is when I can take a step back, review and discuss the features going into a new release, and learn how they can make a positive impact on our users. For example, in a past hallway track at PGCon , I learned how PostgreSQL 12 introduced the ability to do a form of multi-factor a...
Read MoreJoe Conway
Joe Conway
tl;dr -- If you are not actively monitoring your PostgreSQL clusters, and alerting on anomalous conditions, you are "flying blind" . Don't do that! At Crunchy Data , we distribute and support PostgreSQL as a product, in multiple forms, to many enterprise customers. We also make our products available via GitHub , our developer portal , and other places. In particular, our team is well known for our Container Suite and Kubernetes Postgres Operator . Also pertinent to this blog, if less we...
Read MoreYogesh Sharma
Yogesh Sharma
Prometheus is a popular open source monitoring tool and we have many customers that leverage it when using the Crunchy PostgreSQL Operator or Crunchy PostgreSQL High Availability . Prometheus ships out-of-the-box with its own time series data store but we’re big fans of Postgres, and we know Postgres can do time series just fine. Furthermore, if you’re already running PostgreSQL and using Prometheus to monitor it, why not just store that data in a Postgres database? Just because you can do...
Read MoreJonathan S. Katz
Jonathan S. Katz
I'll admit it: I used to have triskaidekaphobia , otherwise known as a "fear or avoidance of the number 13." After all, I grew up in an area with many tall buildings where the elevators have no 13th floor , so it seems like I could rationalize this irrationality. I've been able to push aside this phobia, but I can completely empathize with those who don't like dealing with 13. Which comes to our topic today: the upcoming PostgreSQL 13 release . The fear of the number 13 was enough to prompt d...
Read MoreCaitlin Strong
Caitlin Strong
More and more frequently, customers are being given access to company databases for purposes of account management, receiving customer support, or placing and tracking an order. Although this provides great convenience for the end user, it also opens the database up to certain vulnerabilities . Any feature that allows a user to search or edit content within a database runs the risk of an attacker exploiting this feature to obtain additional access to company information. When a user subverts th...
Read MoreCraig Kerstiens
Craig Kerstiens
Backups are a key staple of running any database. Way back in the day, a good friend and colleague wrote one of the most used Postgres backup tools called wal-e. Wal-e was initially written in just a few days, and rolled out to the fleet of databases we managed in the early days at Heroku. We got pretty lucky with rolling that out, because shortly after we had there was the great AWS Apocalypse of 2011. This was a full day outage of AWS with lingering effects for nearly a week... Reddit was dow...
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