Infrastructure at your Service
By Franck Pachot . I thought that my last post on this blog was the previous one but I blog when it comes to my mind – nothing planned. And two things got me to write this. First, last week we got our 20th dbi xChange where we meet with colleagues. And I love discussing with colleagues about what we see, and foresee, in our jobs. The second one is: https://twitter.com/FranckPachot/status/1409084362637942786?s=20 The web.archive.org is full…
By Franck Pachot . I have published 105 additional blog posts here since the 500th one https://blog.dbi-services.com/rollback-to-savepoint/ that I have written on my come back to dbi-services. On Oracle Database, of course, other databases as well, on clouds (OCI and AWS mainly, with a look at GCP and Azure). But also with some thoughts on the rise of the “scale-out” obsession of NoSQL. And, because I’m convinced that consistency, referential integrity, and SQL is a…
By Franck Pachot . In a previous post I’ve compiled PostgreSQL with GCC 7 and GCC 11 with the default options and checked that the ARM v8.2 features were used. However it may not be so simple: PostgreSQL ./configure defines gcc flags to produce a binary that is compatible with older versions of ARM. This means that it may not use the LSE feature introduced in ARM v8.1 With this, the default compilation (-march=armv8-a) doesn’t…
By Franck Pachot . With Oracle there are many ways to set a state in the session: context variables, set with DBMS_SESSION.SET_CONTEXT and retrieved with SYS_CONTEXT, or package global variables, or global or private temporary tables with ON COMMIT PRESERVE ROWS,… How would you do it in PostgreSQL? I’m taking an example from a Yugabyte slack question, as Yugabyte SQL layer is the PostgreSQL one. CREATE TABLE employees ( employee_no integer PRIMARY KEY, name text,…
By Franck Pachot . This is a little demo, easy to copy-paste, if you want to play with Kubernetes on your laptop. And, not a simple “Hello World” but a real database running here, able to scale up and down with full availability. Install Virtualbox I use Oracle VirtuaBox because I’m a big fan of Oracle products, especially when they are good and free. However, you can use Hyper-V (then just skip this paragraph and…
By Franck Pachot . Should CPU-intensive logic be done in the DB or in application server? Here was a answer found in Reddit: Comment from discussion xpiv’s comment from discussion "Should CPU-intensive logic be done in the DB or in application server?". Reducing the CPU usage on the database server is a major cost saver with commercial databases, like Oracle Enterprise Edition where you pay license per core. But even in Open Source, on-premises or…
By Franck Pachot . Linux kernel has a powerful instrumentation that can be accessed easily. When you want to drill down into your program functions to understand their CPU usage, “perf” is the easiest. It can attach to the processes, sample the CPU cycles, get the symbol name, or even the call stack. And display an histogram of sample counts. This provides an easy profiling tool to understand in which function your program spends its…
By Franck Pachot . In the previous post I have run PostgreSQL on AWS m6gd.2xlarge (ARM Graviton2 processor). I didn’t precise the compilation option and this post will give more details following this feedback: @FranckPachot thanks for sharing the results. Our own testing showed similar perf when using the default gcc7. However, with newer compiler and use of LSE, the graviton2 would provide higher performance : https://t.co/x9OgFqiPPy — NB (@N_B__N_B) March 9, 2021 First, the…
By Franck Pachot . On the AWS free tier, you can run a t2.micro instance for 750 hours per month during the first 12 month after sign-up date. And currently, until June 2021, you can also run a T4g.micro. But be careful, when the free trial ends, or if your usage exceeds the free trial restrictions, you’ll pay the standard pay-as-you-go rates. This is a good occasion to test the Graviton2 ARM processors, and you…
By Franck Pachot . I’ve recently looked at Grafana. Pros: it is really nice, I mean aesthetically. If you want to build a dashboard for your boss, or put it on a large screen in the open space, that’s beautiful. Cons: not mature. I’m working for years with technology that works. When I have a problem, I find the solution (blog posts, forums, mailing lists, support notes)… But with modern software, the first problems I…
