Daniel Westermann

Dealing with corrupted system indexes in PostgreSQL

This is something you do not want to see on an important PostgreSQL system: postgres@centos8pg:/home/postgres/ [pgdev] psql psql: error: could not connect to server: FATAL: index "pg_class_oid_index" contains unexpected zero page at block 0 HINT: Please REINDEX it. The hint(…)

Can there be orphaned data files in PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL, as all other relational database systems, needs to persist data on disk, either by writing the writing the write ahead log or by synchronization the data files on disk whenever there is a checkpoint. When(…)

PostgreSQL 13 will allow to drop databases even when there are connections

One of the most popular blogs I've written about PostgreSQL was about the three databases that PostgreSQL creates by default (well, actually it is initdb that creates the databases). One of the(…)

A simple Terraform script to create an AWS EC2 playground

When I started to write the blog about AWS SSM I quickly realized that I need a way to bring up and destroy my AWS EC2 playground in an easy and reproducible way. There are several(…)

Avoiding patching madness by using AWS SSM

As we have more and more customers either currently moving to AWS or already moved much, if not even all, of their workloads to AWS, one question pops up quite frequently: Now that we have so(…)

pg_auto_failover: Setup and installation

When I attended PGIBZ 2019 earlier this year, I talked with Dimitri about pg_auto_failover and I promised to have a look at it. Well, almost half a year(…)

PostgreSQL 13 will come with partitioning support for pgbench

A lot of people use pgbench to benchmark a PostgreSQL instance and pgbench is also heavily used by the PostgreSQL developers. While declarative partitioning was introduced in PostgreSQL 10 there was no(…)

PostgreSQL check_function_bodies, what is it good for?

One of the probably lesser known PostgreSQL parameters is check_function_bodies. If you know Oracle, then you for sure faced "invalid objects" a lot. In PostgreSQL, by default, there is nothing like an invalid object. That implies(…)

Why you really should use peer authentication in PostgreSQL

It is always a bit of a surprise that many people do not know peer authentication in PostgreSQL. You might ask why that is important as initdb creates a default pg_hba.conf which(…)

Where can you find core developers asking people what is missing in PostgreSQL? pgconf.eu.2019

One of the major advantages of PostgreSQL conferences when you compare it to other conferences is, that you can listen to talks where the actual developers are presenting their work. You have questions about a feature, you want to know(…)