Cleaning up pg_attribute bloat

May 19th, 2010

Around a year ago we made some big changes to the ETL process in our Oncology data warehouse.  The change allowed us to greatly reduce bloat in the data warehouse indexes and tables.  The only problem, this system uses lots and lots and lots of temp tables.  The result of this, we are now bloating the PostgreSQL catalog table pg_catalog.pg_class a substantial amount.  Fortunately the community was a great help and some e-mails on the PostgesSQL e-mail list pointed to a solution.

The simple solution I decided to take, just put this into a nightly cron job:

VACUUM FULL  pg_catalog.pg_class;
REINDEX TABLE pg_catalog.pg_class;
Now pg_attribute could not be cleaner, I love simple solutions. 

My natural habitat

March 29th, 2010

iSCSI SAN Suggestions

March 6th, 2009

We are facing an immediate need to refresh and expand some of our iSCSI storage we are running our PostgreSQL instance on. I am open to just about anything but I wondered if this group would have any suggestions. One item that is a bit unique to our situation is I am not in the need of staggering performance as I am in the need for very cost effective large mounts of storage. For more details on what I am doing: http://www.slideshare.net/AaronThul/this-is-your-postgresql-on-drugs

At the moment I am looking at Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems or a Dell Equallogic. Would anyone like to suggest other options? Has anyone had any problems with those vendors? Anyone like to share a glowing review or success story?

Back in Detroit

December 16th, 2008

After a long and exhausting trip out to SanFansco/Bay Area I am back home. The trip was over a week long and I don’t believe I could have packet more into the 9 days. The trip at a glance:

  1. Help Jorge get ready for FOSSCamp
  2. Attend FOSSCamp
  3. Karaoke and serenaded Leslie Hawthorn
  4. Fun day in the city with Matt
  5. 5 busy days of work
  6. One day at UDS
  7. Google Christmas party
  8. Volunteered at the dance-along nutcracker
  9. Bought two amazing new pair of underwear
  10. Woke up Sunday with a pinch of a headache seeing a shinny Christmas tree, the ocean, and a
    rainbow.
  11. The longest five hour flight home

Perfect images for ChasingNuts.com

December 8th, 2008

My friend Dan updated his picture site and I found some fun squirrel images that are perfect for ChasingNuts.