203 Articles tagged “PostgreSQL”

There’s currently a thread on hackers about bg worker: overview and a series of 6 patches. Thanks a lot Markus! This is all about generalizing a concept already in use in the autovacuum process, where you have an independent subsystem that require having an autonomous daemon running and able to start its own workers. I’ve been advocating about generalizing this concept for awhile already, in order to have postmaster able to communicate to subsystems when to shut down and start and reload, etc.

Nowadays to analyze logs and provide insights, the more common tool to use is pgfouine, which does an excellent job. But there has been some improvements in logs capabilities that we’re not benefiting from yet, and I’m thinking about the CSV log format. So the idea would be to turn pgfouine into a set of SQL queries against the logs themselves once imported into the database. Wait. What about having our next PostgreSQL version, which is meant (I believe) to include CSV support in SQL/MED, to directly expose its logs as a system view?

There’s a big trend nowadays about using column storage as opposed to what PostgreSQL is doing, which would be row storage. The difference is that if you have the same column value in a lot of rows, you could get to a point where you have this value only once in the underlying storage file. That means high compression. Then you tweak the executor to be able to load this value only once, not once per row, and you win another huge source of data traffic (often enough, from disk).

At CHAR(10) Markus had a talk about Using MVCC for Clustered Database Systems and explained how Postgres-R does it. The scope of his project is to maintain a set of database servers in the same state, eventually. Now, what does it mean to get “In the Cloud”? Well there are more than one answer I’m sure, mine would insist on including this “Elasticity” bit. What I mean here is that it’d be great to be able to add or lose nodes and stay online.

It surely does not feel like a full month and some more went by since we were enjoying PGCon 2010, but in fact it was already the time for CHAR(10). The venue was most excellent, as Oxford is a very beautiful city. Also, the college was like a city in the city, and having the accomodation all in there really smoothed it all. On a more technical viewpoint, the range of topics we talked about and the even broader one in the “Hall Track” make my mind full of ideas, again.