Greg Smith
Greg Smith
This week Apple started delivering Macs using their own Apple Silicon chips, starting with a Mac SOC named the M1. M1 uses the ARM instruction set and claims some amazing acceleration for media workloads. I wanted to know how it would do running PostgreSQL, an app that's been running on various ARM systems for years. The results are great! The OSS community around the homebrew project already qualified their PostgreSQL package as working on M1, and with some recompiling work that all worked as e...
Read MoreYorvi Arias
Yorvi Arias
The Postgres documentation covers streaming replication pretty comprehensively, but you may also need something more digestible for reference. In this blog post, we'll discuss how to set up streaming replication in Windows. Credit goes to my colleague Douglas Hunley whose blog post on setting up streaming replication on Linux served as inspiration. To recap, Postgres replication is the process of copying data from one database server (primary) to another (standby). While this blog post will...
Read MoreGreg Smith
Greg Smith
Apple's Intel-based laptops are very popular among developers, and that's as true of people who work on PostgreSQL as other groups. Tomorrow, the first shipping Apple laptops running on ARM CPUs instead of Intel are expected. That is likely to include at least a 13" MacBook Pro. I decided to prepare for that with a survey of PostgreSQL performance on my small herd of Apple laptops. Mine are all the 15" or newer 16" models. Crunchy Data has already started digging into PostgreSQL on ARM performan...
Read MoreJames Chanco Jr.
James Chanco Jr.
In our previous blog post, we talked about upgrading a PostgreSQL cluster to a new major version with pg_upgrade . This can be fast and with little downtime even for large databases, but in some instances zero downtime may be essential for doing a major upgrade. This method is called an "online upgrade" and can be achieved through logical replication . While logical replication can help to achieve a zero-downtime, online upgrade, there are still some things to consider. For some hands-on exp...
Read MoreTom Swartz
Tom Swartz
As a database grows and scales up from a proof of concept to a full-fledged production instance, there are always a variety of growing pains that database administrators and systems administrators will run into. Very often, the engineers on the Crunchy Data support team help support enterprise projects which start out as small, proof of concept systems, and are then promoted to large scale production uses. As these systems receive increased traffic load beyond their original proof-of-concept s...
Read MoreJonathan S. Katz
Jonathan S. Katz
We've seen an example of how to set up PostgreSQL monitoring in Kubernetes . We've looked at two sets of statistics to keep track of it in your PostgreSQL cluster: your vitals (CPU/memory/disk/network) and your DBA fundamentals . While staring at these charts should help you to anticipate, diagnose, and respond to issues with your Postgres cluster, the odds are that you are not staring at your monitor 24 hours a day. This is where alerts come in: a properly set up alerting system will let...
Read MoreJonathan S. Katz
Jonathan S. Katz
I am an accidental DBA, with a huge emphasis on "accidental." I came to PostgreSQL as an application developer who really liked to program with SQL and use the database to help solve my problems. Nonetheless, these systems would enter into production, and as such I had to learn to support them. PostgreSQL monitoring and performance optimization is a vast topic . In fact, I'll read content like what my colleague Greg Smith wrote on benchmarking PostgreSQL 13 on Ubuntu and be reminded that I h...
Read MoreJonathan S. Katz
Jonathan S. Katz
My professional background has been in application development with a strong affinity for developing with PostgreSQL (which I hope comes through in previous articles ). However, in many of my roles, I found myself as the "accidental" systems administrator, where I would troubleshoot issues in production and do my best to keep things running and safe. When it came to monitoring my Postgres databases, I initially took what I knew about monitoring a web application itself, i.e. looking at CPU, m...
Read MoreJonathan S. Katz
Jonathan S. Katz
You don't need monitoring until you need it. But if you're running anything in production, you always need it. This is particularly true if you are managing databases. You need to be able to answer questions like "am I running out of disk?" or "why does my application have degraded performance?" to be able to troubleshoot or mitigate problems before they occur. When I first made a foray into how to monitor PostgreSQL in Kubernetes , let alone in a containerized environment, I learned that a l...
Read MoreDavid Youatt
David Youatt
PostgreSQL has supported streaming replication and hot standbys since version 9.0 (2010), and synchronous replication since version 9.1 (2011). Streaming replication (and in this case we're referring to "binary" streaming replication, not "logical") sends the PostgreSQL WAL stream over a network connection from primary to a replica. By default, streaming replication is asynchronous: the primary does not wait for a replica to indicate that it wrote the data. With synchronous replication, the...
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