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.
Now that we know how to get started with FreeBSD, how to manage users and groups, and how to work with services, we’ll look a bit into Jails today. But before we do this, let’s look at what we have in Linux today when it comes to containerization and virtual machines. Obviously we can manage virtual machines, with either KVM…
This is the third post in the series about getting started with FreeBSD. We’ve looked at the first steps here, and users and groups here. Today we’re looking at how FreeBSD handles services. For those who still don’t like systemd the good news is: There is nothing like systemd in FreeBSD. For those who do like systemd the maybe bad…
In the last post, we’ve initially configured FreeBSD so that networking is up and running, additional packages can be installed, and the system was patched to the latest release. In this post we’ll look at how users and groups are managed in FreeBSD and what FreeBSD provides when it comes to additional security mechanisms. On Linux systems users are usually…
In case you follow the blogs here, you might have noticed that I got interested in FreeBSD over the last months (or even year(s)). The reasons for this are multiple: FreeBSD development is organized in very much the same way as it is with PostgreSQL. The license is very much the same. The history is really interesting as it goes…
In the last post about PostgreSQL on ZFS the pgbench tests showed, that ZFS was slower for the standard tests compared to ext4 on Debian. A comment to that post made me wonder if changing the ZFS record size would change the results, so this blog post is about exactly that. There is plenty of information out there when it…
In the last post we’ve set the baseline for comparing ext4 to zfs when it comes to PostgreSQL. We’ve ended with two PostgreSQL clusters, one running on the ext4 file system while the other is running on top of the ZFS file system. In this post we’ll look at how they compare when it comes to performance and the data…
Recently I’ve switched my PostgreSQL playground from Linux to FreeBSD. Not because I don’t like Linux anymore, just because I like trying out other operating systems and see what works the same and what is different. When you install FreeBSD and stick to the defaults, you’ll get a ZFS root filesystem and usually I don’t create separate partitions/mounts in my…
The PostgreSQL mailing list archives are a wonderful place to get new ideas just by reading through random posts. This time I found an interesting idea on how to partition an existing table almost online without dumping and reloading the data in some way. For those who remember: Before PostgreSQL 10 the only way to partition a table in PostgreSQL…
While investigating a customer issue (details here) one of the replies suggested to use pre_auth_delay to add a delay before a session is authenticated. Even if this was not useful for the actual issue, this can be very useful for other scenarios, and this is the reason for this short blog post. Let’s assume you know that some of your…
The PostgreSQL community is growing every year and the same happens for pgconf.eu, which happened in Athens, Greece, this year. Attending this event is one of the best opportunities to get in touch with the people behind PostgreSQL. This year we had 778 attendees. May it be PostgreSQL hackers, users, developers, organizers or anyone else interested in PostgreSQL in some…
PostgreSQL 17 came with quite some additional features for the optimizer. One of them is about “is null” and “is not null” handling when column have a “not null” constraint defined. In the past it was common to just not add a “is not null” to a query when you are anyway sure that there cannot be any nulls because…
Up to now, there is no official way in PostgreSQL to tweak optimizer statistics manually. While this is quite common in other relational databases, PostgreSQL did not provide anything to do this. The first steps to allow this have now been committed for PostgreSQL 18. Before look at the two new functions which have been added, let’s create a small…
