postgresql

Today is two years since I started working on pg_chameleon. Back in 2016 this commit changed the project’s license from GPL v2 to the 2 clause BSD and the project’s scope, which became a MySQL to PostgreSQL replica system. Since then I learned a lot of lessons, made several mistakes and worked out solutions which resulted in a decent tool for bridging two different universes. Writing a replica system is a very complex task.

In the previous post we configured three devuan servers from scratch using ansible adding the pgdg repository to the apt sources and installing the PostgreSQL binaries.

This tutorial will revisit the apt role’s configuration and will introduce a new role for configuring the postgres operating system’s user for passwordless ssh connections to each other server.

The ansible is a fictional device invented by Ursula K. Le Guin. The ansible allows fast communication between two points across the space, regardless of the distance.

It doesn’t surprise that the Red Hat’s ansible shares the same name as it gives a simple and efficient way to manage servers and automate tasks, yet remaining very lightweight with minimal requirements on the target machines.

In checkpoint post we saw how a misbehaving session can crash PostgreSQL.

Before the version 9.6 the only option for avoiding this sort of things was to setup a script, usually via cron which killed the idle in transaction sessions after a specific timeout. In this post we’ll see in details what are the problems related with this approach and the new features implemented from PostgreSQL 9.6 can help the DBA to tackle potentially dangerous situations.

In the previous post we introduced the PostgreSQL’s dependency system.

At first sight the implementation can look like a maze where the succession of relationships are not clear.

This post will try to give a practical example to show how pg_depend can act like an Ariadne’s thread in order to resolve the dependencies.

The scenario presented is very simple but can be used as a starting point for more complex requirements.

One of the things that distinguish PostgreSQL from other database systems is the way the dependencies between database objects are managed.

PostgreSQL do not allow any invalid object like views or functions. Therefore any action that can invalidate dependent objects results in an error or it’s propagated to the dependent objects.

The mechanism could be confusing at first sight. However the implementation is brilliant and gives great flexibility.

When in February I received the email with the news that my talk was accepted at the pgcon it took me some time, and several espresso coffee, to realise that I wasn’t dreaming. The pgcon email reached me few days after the same talk was accepted at the pycon nove, the Italy’s nationwide Python conference. The Italian Pycon and the Pgcon are great conferences with amazing speakers and fantastic topics. The sole idea of giving my small contribution it makes me proud and a little scared, because I never talked to an audience composed mostly by fine developers.

Before the release of pg_chameleon 2.0 I had to write an upgrade procedure to allow a smooth migration from the version 1.8.

An interesting challenge I faced was to determine the maximum and minimum position for the MySQL’s binary logs belonging to the same server but stored with different values in multiple sources.

The user defined aggregates, a feature pretty unique to PostgreSQL, allowed me to solve the problem in a robust and simple way.

Back in the days of when I was an Oracle DBA I had to solve a strange behaviour on an Oracle installation. The system for some reasons stopped accepting the writes occasionally and without an apparent reason. This behaviour appeared odd to anybody except for my team, which addressed the issue immediately. The problem was caused by a not optimal configuration on the Oracle instance. This thought led me to writing this post.

An ancient italian proverb says Il backup è quella cosa che andava fatta prima. A rough translation could be something like this: the backup is the thing that had to be done before. The concept of backup is quite confusing. Some people wrongly believe that executing a local backup is sufficient to ensure the recover of the data. In the real world a valid backup is present only if three conditions are true.