#295 — March 6, 2019

Read on the Web

Postgres Weekly

PostgreSQL Tools for the Visually Inclined — In response to a SQL Server DBA criticizing Postgres’s tooling, Rob Conery responds with, essentially, a look at how the Postgres (and Unix) culture around tooling is different and how that’s ultimately a good thing.

Rob Conery

A Look at pgCenter's Wait Events Profiler — pgCenter is a popular tool for monitoring and troubleshooting Postgres via stats. The recent 0.6 release added support for profiling wait events (basically when Postgres is waiting for things to happen, such as IO or obtaining a lock).

Alexey Lesovsky

Diagnose & Resolve Performance Across Your PostgreSQL Environment — Manage the health of your infrastructure. Intuitive web-based dashboards alert you to issues that might affect performance or availability, and a clear enterprise-wide view helps you optimize your entire PostgreSQL environment. Download your free trial.

Quest Software sponsor

PostgreSQL Project to Participate in Google Summer of Code 2019 — GSoC is a program in which Google awards stipends to university students who work on certain open source projects during the summer - of which Postgres is one. Learn more here if you want to take part.

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

How to Use JOIN LATERAL and Why You Would Want To

Elein Mustain

Using Parallelism for Queries from PL/pgSQL Functions in Postgres 10+ — While parallel queries were introduced in 9.6, it wasn’t until Postgres 10 that they could be used from PL functions.

Rafia Sabih

I Fought the WAL, and the WAL Won: Why hot_standby_feedback Can Be Misleading

Richard Yen

eBook: How to Get a 3x Performance Improvement on Your Postgres Database — The pganalyze team shares their best practices, learned over the last few years by helping companies like Atlassian optimize their Postgres databases.

pganalyze sponsor

How to Setup Windows Active Directory with Postgres GSSAPI Kerberos Authentication — This is quite niche, but if you need to do it, these pointers will help.

Stephen Frost

How ShiftLeft Uses PostgreSQL Extension TimescaleDB — TimescaleDB is an extension for Postgres that helps with time-series data. Here you can see how ShiftLeft leverages it for their metrics and vulnerability event data.

High Scalability

A Tool to Make PostgreSQL's EXPLAIN ANALYZE More Readable — A tool that lets you paste in the result of EXPLAIN ANALYZE queries and then see a more easily understandable version.

Hubert depesz Lubaczewski

supported by

💡 Tip of the Week

How to get a better Postgres config than the default settings

If you're not using a managed database or you don't have a sysadmin working with you, there's a chance you're using Postgres with its default memory and cache settings. These are mostly fine, but with a few tweaks Postgres can take more advantage of its environment.

Reading the official docs for the settings will get you a long way, but it makes for lengthy bedtime reading! Thankfully, online configuration generators exist that can provide suggested settings better than the defaults, and it only takes a minute to do.

First up is pgtune. Put in your server's OS, memory, disk type, and answer a few other questions to get the main settings suggested to you.

Second is pgconfig.org. This tool was heavily inspired by pgtune but has some neat extras, such as being able to see the different settings for different types of workload side by side.

The Tip of the Week is sponsored by Datadog, a cloud monitoring platform for PostgreSQL infrastructure, distributed tracing and logging. Start a free trial.

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