Posts published under the Open source Team account are collective contributions by the dbi services open infrastructure consultants. The practice covers open-source databases and platforms, PostgreSQL first of all, along with MySQL, MariaDB, and Linux, from architecture, replication, and high availability to performance tuning and operations under service level agreements, and contributes actively to the PostgreSQL community.
In the last post about SUSE Multi Linux Manager we had a look at how you can schedule OpenSCAP reports using the API. In this post we’ll look into something very basic: How can you patch the server components of SUSE Multi Linux Manager. We speak about components because you need to patch the host (which is a SLE Micro…
As we’ve recently supported some customers on SUSE Multi Linux Manager I’d like share something which was not as easy to implement as it appeared to be in the first place. But first of all, what is SUSE Multi Linux Manager? It is basically a fork of Spacewalk which was also used as the upstream project by the Red Hat…
For a recent project at one of our customers we needed to get data from a Db2 database into PostgreSQL. The first solution we thought of was the foreign data wrapper for Db2. This is usually easy to setup and configure and all you need are the client libraries (for Db2 in this case). But it turned out that db2_fdw…
( note: I am writing this as member of the pgconf.de organization team, and not as a dbi services employee ) After almost half a year of planning and preparation PostgreSQL Conference Germany 2025 finally took place last week in Berlin. It was in the same hotel as the 2022 edition of PostgreSQL Conference Europe and this was a good…
Before we explore Microsoft Defender & Arc, I must clarify: Setting up Microsoft Defender and Arc on a Linux server, especially one without internet access and with robust security monitoring and hardening, may seem counterintuitive. However, because the software was already purchased, managers insist on deploying the same product across all servers. So here we are, deploying a Microsoft closed…
Everybody is talking about AI, RAG and language models today. A lot of people are using ChatGPT or other tools to get answers to their questions, generate text or images. While this sometimes is really helpful (depending on how you use it) you still need to be skeptical about the information you get out of those tools. To understand how…
This is maybe one the biggest steps forward for PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL 18 will come with support for asynchronous I/O. Traditionally PostgreSQL relies on the operating system to hide the latency of writing to disk, which is done synchronously and can lead to double buffering (PostgreSQL shared buffers and the OS file cache). This is most important for WAL writes, as…
Last week, I hit a wall when my SUSE Linux Enterprise Server license expired, stopping all repository access. Needing PostgreSQL urgently, I couldn’t wait for SUSE to renew my license and had to act fast.I chose to disable every SLES repository and switched to the openSUSE Leap repository. This worked flawless and made my system usable in very short time.…
Another great feature was committed for PostgreSQL 18 if you are interested how memory is used by a backend process. While you can take a look at the memory contexts for your current session since PostgreSQL 14, there was no way to retrieve that information for another backend. Since PostgreSQL 14 there is the pg_backend_memory_contexts catalog view. This view displays…
Before we take a look at what this new feature is about, let’s have a look at how PostgreSQL 17 (and before) handles “NOT NULL” constraints when they get created. As usual we start with a simple table: Trying to insert data into that table which violates the constraint of course will fail: Even if you can set the column…
In this Blog post I will try to give a pure technical cheat sheet using Btrfs on any distribution. Additionally I will explain how to use one of the most sophisticated backup/ restore tool called “snapper”. What is Btrfs and how to set it up if not already installed? Btrfs (aka Butter FS or aka B-Tree FS) is like xfs…
When you want to upgrade from one major version of PostgreSQL to another you probably want to go with pg_upgrade (or logical replication). There are several modes of operations for this already: What is best for you, depends on the requirements. We usually go with “–link” as this is pretty fast, but you can only do that if the old…
