Chasing Nuts » PostgreSQL

Cleaning up pg_attribute bloat

Aaron Thul — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:42:36 +0000

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.

iSCSI SAN Suggestions

Aaron Thul — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:46:25 +0000

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?

PGCon is going great!

Aaron Thul — Thu, 22 May 2008 11:06:11 +0000

PGCon has been a great event so far and is only half over! Two days of tutorials wrapped up yesterday and I learned a lot about GUCs, Materialized Views that Really Work, and Database Anti-Patterns.

Last night the fun really kicked up with Yahoo! hosting a night of drinks, food and a Wii give away. I learned that Yahoo is not only a PostgreSQL shop but has a two petabyte PosgresSQL database, I think PostgreSQL may be ready for the enterprise

Today the hour long sessions start and there are many great presentations I am looking forward to attending. Today is also the day I will be speaking and look forward to talking about the EMOL project, another PostgreSQL success story.

I did it right this time

Aaron Thul — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:18:15 +0000

I took a little time today and upgraded my WordPress install to version 2.3.3. Though some mistakes are just too much fun to make only once I managed to upgrade the site without taking it down this time.

On another note I will be talking about my favorite database PostgreSQL tomorrow at MUG. I plan to talk about the histroy of the project and then get into all the super hot new features. After that I will also shamelessly plug Penguicon.

Josh Berkus on PostgreSQL

Aaron Thul — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:02:23 +0000

For those regular listeners of FLOSS weekly this may not be a new flash but Josh Berkus had a great chat with Leo Leport about PostgreSQL recently. I really do enjoy the program and sure with that is really was weekly or I would even take bimonthly. Unfortunitally FLOOS Weekly has had a hard time getting to just the once a month some times.

On another PostgreSQL note PGCon is an annual conference for users and developers of PostgreSQL and I am going to make plans to attend this year. I am working on a Proposals to talk about some of the work I am helping my friends over at EMOL (Electronic Medical Office Logistics). I think I may title it: Patients, Physicians, Prescriptions, PostgeSQL, and Petabytes.