Recipes for PostgreSQL

Session 1: PostgreSQL Administration Recipes

Speaker: Gianni is active in the PostgreSQL community, as a board member of the Italian PostgreSQL User Group (ITPUG), and an organiser of various editions of the Italian PGDay as well as of the first European PGDay in Prato, Italy (2009).

He is a PostgreSQL and PostGIS consultant at 2ndQuadrant, as a developer, consultant and trainer, and has been speaking at PostgreSQL conferences in several European countries and in USA. Before that he worked at the University of Florence as a researcher in Mathematics.

He is an author of the PostgreSQL 9 Administration Cookbook, second edition, from Packt Publishing (Birmingham, 2015).

Description: In this talk we demonstrate some techniques that a PostgreSQL DBA can use to solve recurring problems, in the simple format of a cooking recipe.

We will consider problems such as: changing your password securely, i.e. without leaving traces of the new password around; quickly estimating the number of rows in a table, sensibly balancing speed vs accuracy; checking which parameters have a non-default setting, so you will avoid surprises when replaying that administration script; carefully removing unwanted indexes, because it is much easier to destroy than to rebuild.

Session 2: SD-Pg_insight: a performance analysis tool.

Speaker: Reiner Peterke, responsible for the PostgresPURE development at Splendid Data.

Description:

One of the best methods to maintain your PosgreSQL database, is to take a look at the behavior of the PostgreSQL database in the past.

Splendid Data is working on an Open Source project called pgInsight (it is still a work name). pgInsight collects statistics history for performance monitoring. It is a flexible tool for collecting applicable data from the postgres stat and statio views. This information is vital to be able to check the health of your database.

We want to introduce and share this Open Source project with you.