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Reflections on PgConf.US 2015

Saturday the 18th of April, I woke up to the following:

It was one of those moments that you realize just how blessed of a life you have. A moment where you stop and realize that you must have done something right, at least once. I was with my all of my ladies, there were no other people at the camp site, the weather was clear and it was …

WhatcomPUG meeting last night on: sqitch and... bitcoin friends were made!

Last night I attended the second WhatcomPUG. This meeting was about Sqitch, a interesting database revision control mechanism. The system is written in Perl and was developed by David Wheeler of PgTap fame. It looks and feels like git. As it is written in Perl it definitely has too many options. That said, what we were shown works, works well and appears to be a solid and thorough …

Stomping to PgConf.US: Webscale is Dead; PostgreSQL is King! A challenge, do you accept?

I submitted to PgConf.US. I submitted talks from my general pool. All of them have been recently updated. They are also all solid talks that have been well received in the past. I thought I would end up giving my, "Practical PostgreSQL Performance: AWS Edition" talk. It is a good talk, is relevant to today and the community knows of my elevated opinion of using AWS with PostgreSQL (there …

PostgreSQL is King! Last week was quite busy being a servant.

Last week was one of the busiest community weeks I have had in a long time. It started with an excellent time in Vancouver, B.C. giving my presentation, "An evening with PostgreSQL!" at VanLUG. These are a great group of people. They took all my jibes with good humor (Canadians gave us Maple Syrup, we gave them Fox News) and we enjoyed not only technical discussion but discussions on technology …

AWS performance: Results included

I am not a big fan of AWS. It is a closed platform. It is designed to be the Apple of the Cloud to the Eve of Postgres users. That said, customers drive business and some of our customers use AWS, even if begrudgingly. Because of these factors we are getting very good at getting PostgreSQL to perform on AWS/EBS, albeit with some disclosures:

That high IO latency is an …

Don't kill yourself

As a PostgreSQL consultant you end up working with a lot of different types of clients and these clients tend to all have different requirements. One client may need high-availability, while another needs a DBA, while yet another is in desperate need of being hit with a clue stick and while it is true that there can be difficult clients, there is no bad client.

What!!! Surely you can't be …

Along the lines of GCE, here are some prices

I was doing some research for a customer who wanted to know where the real value to performance is. Here are some pricing structures between GCE, AWS and Softlayer. For comparison Softlayer is bare metal versus virtual.

GCE: 670.00
16 CPUS
60G Memory
2500GB HD space

GCE: 763.08
16 CPUS
104G Memory
2500GB HD space

Amazon: 911.88
16 CPUS
30G Memory
3000GB HD Space

Amazon: 1534.00
r3.4xlarge
16 CPUS
122.0 …

GCE, A little advertised cloud service that is perfect for PostgreSQL

Maybe...

I have yet to run PostgreSQL on GCE in production. I am still testing it but I have learned the following:

A standard provision disk for GCE will give you ~ 80MB/s random write.
A standard SSD provisioned disk for GCE will give you ~ 240MB/s.

Either disk can be provisioned as a raw device allowing you to use Linux Software Raid to build a RAID 10 which even …

PDXPGDay 2014

I had the honor of being asked to give the introduction at PDXPGDay 2014 this past Saturday. I didn't speak very long but it was great to see a lot of the old stomping ground. It had been quite some time since I had been in the group of Wheeler, Roth, Wong, Berkus and a few others.

The conference was really a mini-conference but it was great. It was held …

apt.postgresql.org... a wonderful if flawed apt repository

The site apt.postgresql.org is a great resource for those who live in the Debian derived world. It keeps up to date with the latest postgresql packages and has a whole team dedicated to creating these packages. Of course, this is the Open Source world so not everyone agrees 100% with the way things are done in this project. As I noted here, there are some issues.

These issues are not …

Postgres and Open Source Experts

Blog

Reflections on PgConf.US 2015

WhatcomPUG meeting last night on: sqitch and... bitcoin friends were made!

Stomping to PgConf.US: Webscale is Dead; PostgreSQL is King! A challenge, do you accept?

PostgreSQL is King! Last week was quite busy being a servant.

AWS performance: Results included

Don't kill yourself

Along the lines of GCE, here are some prices

GCE, A little advertised cloud service that is perfect for PostgreSQL

PDXPGDay 2014

apt.postgresql.org... a wonderful if flawed apt repository

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