Database Administration & Monitoring

Why is the default postgres database slightly larger than template1?

You probably know that a fresh initialized PostgreSQL cluster comes with three databases by default: template0, template1, and postgres. If you want to know why they are there, and what their purpose is, check this post. In(…)

PostgreSQL, pg_ctl and signals

I believe most people use pg_ctl nowadays to start, stop, or restart a PostgreSQL instance. You can do all these tasks without using pg_ctl, but you'll notice in a minute that pg_ctl really is your friend. Even(…)

Getting started with Citus – Setting up a four node cluster

One issue with traditional database systems like PostgreSQL is, that you cannot easily scale vertically. Of course you could add read replicas and offload read operations, but that either requires changes in the application, or putting something in front that(…)

Virtual Symposium SQL Server & Azure SQL – Session: Debugging without debugger

As a consultant at dbi services we can dedicate a significant part of our time to training and I took the opportunity today to attend an online conference. In this blog post, I will present this event and(…)

CentOS 8 binary compatible alternatives

There is a lot of roumors around since it was anounced to switch CentOS 8 from a Downstream Build from RHEL 8 to a Upstream Build for RHEL 8 on December 8th 2020. Many people asked why a second(…)

Patching ODA HA from 19.8 to 19.10

In this blog I am describing the steps to patch an ODA HA from the version 19.8 to version 19.10. The patching was done with a customer. Thanks to Pierre. The name of the servers were changed The ODA(…)

PostgreSQL: set_config and current_setting

PostgreSQL comes with a rich set of administrative functions for various use cases. There are functions to control parameters, there are functions for index maintenance, others are for recovery and or backup control and there is much more. In this(…)

Building a PostgreSQL EC2 AMI for testing the latest commits

Testing the latest features or bug fixes in PostgreSQL can easily be done by pulling the latest commits from the git repository and compile PostgreSQL from source code. I am doing that frequently on my local sandbox VM but this(…)

Is it possible to switch a service between 2 pluggable databases?

Introduction In an Oracle database, services have multiple purposes: identifying group of users prior authenticating them enabling/disabling access to a database for particular groups managing preferred nodes on a RAC configuration redirecting users to the primary after a switchover/failover when(…)

SQL Server CPU limitation for Express and Standard Edition

Introduction When performing an audit on an SQL Server VM the first thing the system administrator told me was that there’s no issue with the CPU on this box, the monitoring shows it’s always around 50% usage. Problem Here is(…)