Infrastructure at your Service
By Franck Pachot . Your application workload is usually not constant and maybe not predictable. If you undersize the capacity, you will save money but in case of peak of activity you will have severe performance issues. Thus, you need to size the capacity for peak workloads: you pay for idle CPU when out of those peaks. This is one major reason for virtualization and cloud: elasticity. Because the hardware is shared by multiple applications,…
By Franck Pachot . I contribute to multiple technologies communities. I’m an Oracle ACE Director for many years, and I also became an AWS Data Hero recently 🎉. I got asked if there’s no conflict with that, as Amazon and Oracle are two competitors. Actually, there’s no conflict at all. Those advocacy programs are not about sales, but technology. Many database developers and administrators have to interact with more than one cloud provider, and those…
AWS RDS for PostgreSQL comes with an extension that allows you to fetch data from AWS S3 and to write back data to AWS S3. The use case for this is obvious: Either you use other AWS services that write data to S3 and you want to further process that data in PostgreSQL, or you want other AWS services to consume data from PostgreSQL by providing that data in S3. Let’s have a look at…
By Franck Pachot . I’ve heard and read people saying that the PostgreSQL managed service is not the true open-source PostgreSQL from the community. This is wrong and I’m writing this post to clarify it. PostgreSQL on EC2 Obviously, you can install PostgreSQL on an EC2 instance, as a database running on IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). You have the full choice of version, you can even compile it from sources, and add whatever extensions…
After the previous posts about Exasol, which have been more around installation, administration, backup & restore, loading data and general notes around transactions and sessions we’ll now go into more details how Exasol manages data. Here is the list of the previous posts: Getting started with Exasol – Setting up an environment Getting started with Exasol – Loading data from PostgreSQL Getting started with Exasol – Some words about indexes and transactions Getting started with…
As of now, all the previous posts worked with the Community Edition of Exasol. While that is great for getting started quickly (the Community Edition comes with all the features, except multi node support and a limit of 200GB of data) there are some limitations: Can you not really test how data is distributed across cluster nodes because there is only one. You do not have a real access to the operating system as the…
By Franck Pachot . I’ve written a blog post about serverless databases and here is an example of Amazon RDS Aurora PostgreSQL in serverless mode: When I’ve created the instance (15:55 – CloudWatch is GMT+2 but event log is UTC), it started with 0 capacity unit (18:03), which means that it was paused (you pay for storage only). Then I connected and the instance was resumed (18:19) to its maximum capacity unit (4 here). And…
By Franck Pachot . When I’m writing about a product I like to be precise about the name, the upper and lower case, and even more: do you know that was taking special care of writing Oracle 12cR2 before then non-italic came with 18c? And that’s also the reason I’m not writing a lot about VMware as it takes me 5 minutes to put the uppercase right 😀 You may have seen that many Amazon…
By Franck Pachot . That’s common to any data structure, whether it is RDBMS or NoSQL, indexes are good to accelerate reads but slow the writes. This post explains the consequences of adding indexes in DynamoDB. Secondary Indexes What we call an index in DynamoDB is different from an index in RDBMS. They have the same goal: store your data with some redundancy in order to have it physically partitioned, sorted, and clustered differently than…
By Franck Pachot . DynamoDB is a cloud-native, managed, key-value proprietary database designed by AWS to handle massive throughput for large volume and high concurrency with a simple API. simple API: Get, Put, Query, Scan on a table without joins, optimizer, transparent indexes,… high concurrency: queries are directed to one shard with a hash function massive throughput: you can just add partitions to increase the IOPS large volume: it is a shared-nothing architecture where all…
