Experts in Postgres and Open Source Infrastructure

From the hackers:

Replicator 8.3-1.8.1 It is recommended to update your 8.3-1.8.0 installation. No changes required for replication databases or configuration files. Release notes: - Fixed a bug that lead to occasional crashes of the master's backend when performing updates to a table with dropped columns. - Fixed a couple of minor mcp_stat problems.

• Download it here.
• Project site

Reminder: We are in the midst of the PostgreSQL Conference West call for papers. The call for papers ends 08/20/09. If you wish to be considered to present you must submit a talk.

I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Replicator 8.3-1.8. Everyone jump start their engines over here.

PostgreSQL Conference West 2009 Call for Papers June 24th, 2009, the PostgreSQL Conference U.S. team is pleased to announce the West 2009 venue and call for papers. This year the premiere West Coast PostgreSQL Conference will be leaving its roots at Portland State University and moving north to sunny Seattle, Washington. The event this year is being held at Seattle Central Community College from October 16th through 18th. The move …

This is a tutorial to show you the basics of creating a small project within Pylons, with Simpycity. This tutorial assumes that you have already set up a Linux development environment for Pylons. Preferably on Ubuntu, though these directions should be general enough for any other Linux environment, meaning that you have installed Apache2, Python, mod-wsgi, and PostgreSQL 8.3. Choose a working directory for your project. For this example, I …

Recently I was doing some benchmarking on one of our machines. The benchmarking wasn't going so well due to bad batteries on the RAID controller. I had instructed one of our System Administrators to take care of the problem. Long story short, the Administrator went down a very long trail to an obvious solution. The trail was well mapped, thought out and precise. It however missed some important points. …

As reported in my last blog, Stefan was having much greater success with his pgbench results than I. In reviewing why, we found a problem with the hardware. What I like about this problem is that the results in the previous blog post become more interesting. As a reminder I was running 16 connections over 4 different users at 1M transactions. Below is the results from a single user from …

So while doing the benchmarking of the various parameters, Stefan pointed out the my numbers were ridiculously low. I wasn't really paying attention because I was looking at differences between parameters but then he posted me an example of a single thread pgbench using my same parameters. His machine is a dual core connected to 10 spindles on a NetAPP. In theory my machine should be faster. It is not. …

Continuing my postgresql.conf changes I ran a new test yesterday with checkpoint_segments set to 300. As a reminder the original results and specs of the machine being used in the test are here. The results of the new test below:

pghost:  pgport: 6000 nclients: 4 nxacts: 1000000 dbName: bench
transaction type: TPC-B (sort of)
scaling factor: 100
number of clients: 4
number of transactions per client: 1000000
number of transactions …

I recently purchased some used hardware for some performance testing of PostgreSQL. I didn't want to interrupt the great work that Mark Wong was doing with the PostgreSQL Performance Lab. The testing I am doing is a bit different than Mark's. Where Mark is testing various filesystem performance via PostgreSQL using DBT2 and FIO and wanted to go up a level. I am testing using the PostgreSQL tool pgbench which …