For those interested, here is my slide stack from PostgreSQL Conference East '08. I think the title of the talk was "PostgreSQL: Looking under the hood with Solaris."
The presentation was 90 minutes long and had lots of shell-based show-and-tell. Obviously that stuff isn't available in the slides. I think it went over quite well. The audience was small, but hopefully people took away the a lasting impression of what DTrace has to offer and at least one person had the response: "
I just attended the Keynote by Joshua Drake from Command Prompt. There are a lot of good movements on the operational organization of the PostgreSQL community. I think his vision of the community is more aggressive and structured than many are prepared for, but in a community as large as the PostgreSQL community it is very good to have someone pushing the envelope and attempting to apply a vision. I don't want to go as far as Josh wants to do, but we'll wind up part of the way there and that "
I was just surfing Planet PostgreSQL and read Selena Deckelmann's blog post that said the 2008 PostgreSQL Conference East is this Saturday and Sunday. My first response was, "WTF? I though it was like two weeks away and on a Thursday and Friday." My second response was, "I'm speaking at that, I should go." My third though? You should go too.
So... I, like any professional speaker, finished my slides on time and turned them in several weeks ago.
Sometimes I can be a jackass about semantics. I don't always use the right words, but I should be corrected when I choose poorly. The reason we have so many of these word things is because most have outright different meanings and those that are synonymous have nuance that makes one more appropriate than another in a certain context.
I deal with a lot of large systems and many large systems are complicated.
So, the state of open source database replication is pretty sad. MySQL replication just doesn't cut it in many serious environments because the slaves can't keep up with the write load on the master. So, PostgreSQL right? Well, not so fast. PostgreSQL replication is handled in one of two ways: Slony or PITR (point-in-time recovery).
Slony provides all the same features as MySQL's replication (except that it is much harder to setup and maintain), but also boasts the same acute performance issues -- a busy master can easily outpace slaves, leaving them in the dust.
We've been doing a lot of PostgreSQL work lately and we have one largish system (terabytes) that runs on top of Apple XServe RAIDs. While people argue that SATA is getting better, let it be understood that Fibre channel SCSI drives rule. The difference between carrier class storage and "enterprise" (a.k.a. commodity) is pretty tremendous. While this system will eventually make good use of the XServer RAIDs and long-term storage containers for write-once read-many data tables (archives), the "
I wrote before about a largish postgres isntance. Things are starting to take shape and more people are onboard my little Postgres flagship here. All are repeating my same bitching and moaning during my adoption (teaching me that these are indeed critical issues to solve in postrges): What do you mean I can't hint to the query planner? I can't grant a user access to a schema including future tables in that schema, you're joking right?
