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2018-11-28

Combining pgBackRest and Streaming Replication

pgBackRest is a well-known powerful backup and restore tool. It offers a lot of possibilities.

While pg_basebackup is commonly used to setup the initial database copy for the Streaming Replication, it could be interesting to reuse a previous database backup (eg. taken with pgBackRest) to perform this initial copy.

Furthermore, the --delta option provided by pgBackRest can help us to re-synchronize an old secondary server without having to rebuild it from scratch.

To reduce the load on the primary server during a backup, pgBackRest even allows to take backups from a standby server.

We’ll see in this blog post how to do that.

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2018-11-26

PostgreSQL 12 preview - recovery.conf disappears

PostgreSQL needs some infrastructure changes to have a more dynamic reconfiguration around recovery, eg. to change the primary_conninfo at runtime.

The first step, mostly to avoid having to duplicate the GUC logic, results on the following patch.

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2018-02-28

Custom PGDATA with systemd

By default, on CentOS 7, the PostgreSQL v10 data directory is located in /var/lib/pgsql/10/data.

Here’s a simple trick to easily place it somewhere else without using symbolic links.

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2018-02-09

PAF cluster management

PAF (aka. “PostgreSQL Automatic Failover” : http://clusterlabs.github.io/PAF/) is a Resource Agent providing service High Availability for PostgreSQL, based on Pacemaker and Corosync.

In the previous post, we saw how to quickly install it. Let’s see now how to manage it.

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2018-02-07

Introduction to PostgreSQL Automatic Failover

As described by Magnus Hagander during his great talk about “PostgreSQL Replication in 2018” at the last FOSDEM event, PAF (aka. “PostgreSQL Automatic Failover” : http://clusterlabs.github.io/PAF/) is a Resource Agent providing service High Availability for PostgreSQL, based on Pacemaker and Corosync.

If you have good system skills and wish a reliable way of having automatic failover, you should definitively consider using PAF!

Let’s see in this post how to quickly install it.

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2018-01-23

PostgreSQL 11 preview - update a partition key

In the case of a partitioned table, updating a row might cause it to no longer satisfy the partition constraint of the containing partition.

There’s a recent commit for version 11 modifying PostgreSQL behavior in that case.

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2018-01-09

Filter out pg_dump from check_pgactivity alerts

check_pgactivity (https://github.com/OPMDG/check_pgactivity) is designed to monitor PostgreSQL clusters from Nagios. It offers many options to measure and monitor useful performance metrics.

Imagine you have a very large database and pg_dump produce abnormal query time alerts. The upcoming release of check_pgactivity offers a way to filter out those alerts !

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2018-01-04

introduction to pgBackRest

Remark: This post has been updated on 2019-07-19, with pgBackRest 2.15

pgBackRest (http://pgbackrest.org/) aims to be a simple, reliable backup and restore system that can seamlessly scale up to the largest databases and workloads.

Instead of relying on traditional backup tools like tar and rsync, pgBackRest implements all backup features internally and uses a custom protocol to communicate with remote systems. Removing reliance on tar and rsync allows better solutions to database-specific backup challenges. The custom remote protocol also allows more flexibility and limits the types of connections that are required to perform a backup which increases security.

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2017-12-22

combine pgreplay with pgBadger

pgreplay, written by Laurenz Albe, reads a PostgreSQL log file, extracts the SQL statements and executes them in the same order and with the original timing against a PostgreSQL database.

While pgreplay will find out if your database application will encounter performance problems, it does not provide a lot of help in the analysis of the cause of these problems. Combine pgreplay with a specialized analysis program like pgBadger (https://github.com/dalibo/pgbadger) for that.

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