bwpug

Last night at BWPUG, Greg Smith gave his talk on "Managing High Volume Writes with Postgres", which dives deep into the intersection of checkpoint behavior and shared buffers, and also into dealing with vacuum. One of the things I always like about Greg's talks are it's a good way to measure what we've learned between reading code and running large scale / highly loaded system in the wild. Even in the cases where we disagree, it's good to get a different point of view on things. If you manage Postgres systems and get the chance to see this talk, it's worth taking a look (and I suspect he'll post the slides up somewhere this week, if they aren't already available).

One of the other cool things that came out of the talk was one of the guys on my team again validating why we love working with Circonus. We have an unofficial slogan that with Circonus, "if you can write a query, you can make a graph". Well, Keith noticed that we didn't have any monitoring for the background writer info on one of our recently upgraded from 8.3->9.1 multi-TB Postgres, so he jump into Circonus and just like that, we had metrics and a graph faster than Greg could move off the slide. This will be awesome once we accumulate some more data, but here's a screenshot I took from last night while we were in the talk:



Yay graphs!

Update: Shortly after posting, Keith mentioned that he had updated the graph to speak in MB rather than Buffers. So, here is an updated screenshot with friendlier output and more data. (Note that Phil, one of our other DBA's, also flipped the buffers allocated to a right axis as well).

Hey Folks!

Looks like we had a snafu with the Meetup site where it was showing the meet on our old schedule last week rather than the new schedule. We're in the process of fixing that, but wanted to make sure everyone knew that we are still going to meet on our new night, which is tomorrow, Tuesday, September 20th.

This month, Theo will talk about application and systems performance measurement and why almost everyone does it wrong. It's not hard to do right, but people often approach these things completely wrong. So, we'll look at some numbers, understand why they are misleading and talk about the right way to approach these problems. Since we can't always approach things the right way, we'll talk a bit about adding a tiny bit of value to the "wrong" approach.

When: September 20th, ~6:30PM.
Where: 7070 Samuel Morse Dr, Columbia, MD, 21042.
Host: OmniTI

As always we will have time for networking and we can do some more open Q & A, and we'll likely hit one of the local restaurants after the meet.

BWPUG Meetup Page
BWPUG Mailing List

A reminder that tomorrow, Wednesday (the 11th) is the BWPUG meeting for
May. This month Greg Smith will be stopping by to give a preview of
his upcoming PGCon Tutorial, "Postgres Performance PItfalls".
PostgreSQL is a database system that can deliver excellent performance
for a wide variety of applications. But it's easy to run into an issue
that keeps you from seeing its full potential. There are a few basic
PostgreSQL configuration and use misunderstandings that cause most of
the early performance issues administrators and developers encounter.

When: May 11th, ~6:30PM.
Where: 7070 Samuel Morse Dr, Columbia, MD, 21042.
Host: OmniTI

As always we will have time for networking and we can do some more
open Q & A, and we'll likely hit one of the local restaurants after
the meet.

BWPUG Meetup Page
BWPUG Mailing List

A reminder that today, Wednesday (the 13th) is the BWPUG meeting for
April. This month we're going to forgo a formal speaker and in favor of an "Open Mic Night". Got questions about Postgres? Need help on a problem? Recently done something awesome? Did you learn anything from PGEast? Come swap stories with fellow Meetup members and/or get help if you need it.


When: April 13th, ~6:30PM.
Where: 7070 Samuel Morse Dr, Columbia, MD, 21042.
Host: OmniTI

As always we will have time for networking and we can do some more
open Q & A, and we'll likely hit one of the local restaurants after
the meet.

Don't forget to check out our Meetup page, please feel free to sign up and/or RSVP.

Howdy folks,

A reminder that this Wednesday (the 10th) is the BWPUG meeting for November.
This month's topic will be "Achieving PCI compliance with Postgres". PCI-DSS standard
was developed by credit card companies to help protect cardholders from identity theft
and enhance cardholder security. While the standard has a history going back almost
10 years, there are still many questions and challenges faced for people trying
to stay compliant, especially within the open source arena.

When: November 10th, ~6:30PM.
Where: 7070 Samuel Morse Dr, Columbia, MD, 21042.
Host: OmniTI

As always we will have time for networking and we can do some more
open Q & A, and we'll likely hit one of the local restaurants after
the meet.

A reminder that tommorrow night, BWPUG will be gathering for its September meeting. This months we're rounding up the gang to discuss "PostgreSQL Security via SE-Postgres", including the current TODO's, and what to focus on now that 9.0 is just around the corner and 9.1 development will be starting in earnest. We expect to have a good crowd on hand, including some potential out-of-towners, so we hope to see you there.

When: Septmber 8th, ~6:30PM.
Where: 7070 Samuel Morse Dr, Columbia, MD, 21042.
Host: OmniTI

As always we have time for networking and likely hit one of the local
restaurants after the meeting, hope to see you there.

A reminder note from Stephan Frost:

Hey all!

This month BWPUG returns to DC/Falls Church!

When: July 14th, 6:30PM (this Wednesday!)
Where: 3150 Fairview Park Dr, Falls Church, VA
Host: Noblis, Inc. and the
Noblis Innovation and Collaboration Center (NICC)

It's basically at 495 and 50 in Northern Virginia. We'll be discussing
the work and progress made so far on the PostgreSQL Performance Farm
scripts done by Scott (an intern working for Noblis over the summer
from Virginia Tech).

If you're planning to attend, please RSVP to sfrost@noblis.org. The
host/facility we'll be meeting at does require a government issued
photo ID (eg: driver's license or passport).

Hope to see you there!

Thanks,

Stephen