Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Thoughts from PGConf.eu, PostgreSQL Europe Conference 2015, Day 3

This is a continuation and the last piece of notes from PGConf.eu in Vienna this year. First day notes available here and second day notes available here.

I started the 3rd day with KaiGai Kohei, who talked about pb_strom in his presentation called GPGPU Accelerates PostgreSQL - Unlock the power of multi-thousand cores. Plugin pg_strom is a  combination of PostgreSQL and gpgpu, which is a project in early state that aims to online native GPU code generation (nvrtc run-time compilier, cached, so compilation is done only once). It uses 9.5 feature of custom scan/join interface, that allows to overwrite part of the execution plan. Benchmarking showed approx. 5x speedup for queries that included 100M rows; join was more important than aggregate. Another benchmark showed some anomalies where pg_strom was slower for some queries.
https://github.com/pg-strom/devel

Ruben Gaspar Aparicio from Cern provided some experiences from his work as DBaaS. Except DB related information, some Cern statistics were also unbelieveble -- 6000+ magnets in The large hadron collider, which makes it the largest machine in the world. It produces 0.5PB data in one second during proton collision, totally 100PB stored now, CPU with 250K cores, 2M jobs per day. 8000 physicists require real-time access to all that LHC data from 160 computer centres in 35 countries.

Except 36 PostgreSQL 9.2 and 9.4 they use 226 MySQL and 8 Oracle in DB on demand (DBoD), then RAC with ~100 Oracle DBs. They support SSO in system, overview of instances DB providers offer different things, own DBs on demand is how the physicists work. The DBaaS supports upgrades, monitoring, backup and HA. However, there is no DBA support nor app support nor Vendor support. Everybody gets own database and must solve issues on their own. System supports back-up, configuration changes, PiTR (point in time recovery). Statistics of queries can be intuitively seen by uesrs that are no DB experts. Logs overview helps to fix problems by users themselves.
I was smiling about Ruben's quote that "Deleting is manual, because there are people who don't realize that when they delete something it is no more there."

New machines are installed by puppet and they run on physical servers + OpenStack as infrastructure. They already plan to use containers for running the DBs in Cern. They use Coverity and apps are usually written in Perl 5.20. Travis-CI is then used for running unit-testing.

Correct mount options are very important for proper performance (slave laging) of PostgreSQL.
Tools using: pg_upgrade, pg_snashot,pgbadger, pgreplay
Future vision with Containers (LXC): limit CPU+memory, cli access to instances.
https://github.com/cerndb/

Locked Up: Advances in Postgres Data Encryption by Vibhor Kumar summarized possibilities of encryption in PostgreSQL -- we can either encrypt in applications, pgcrypto modul or use pgp encryption.

Gianni Ciolli talked about repmgr in talk called Automate High Availability using repmgr 3. The tool supports cascading replications, clusterware, uses barman, pgBouncer, pg_rewind.
https://github.com/2ndQuadrant/repmgr/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

Talk The Elephants In The Room: Limitations of the PostgreSQL Core Technology by Robert Haas direct I/O was then about dirty kernel page buffers when writing to disc, where PostgreSQL was not able to do almost anything. A need for full featured logincal replication solution was mentioned as something we really need (not only features).
Database size is bigger and bigger -- horizontal scalability seems to be the answer, i.e. the focus is in better sharding.
Other areas to consider: better parallel queries, changes to storage format, direct I/O, built-in connection pooler.

Simon Riggs closed the event with a keynote where he mentioned pgconf.eu 2015 to be the worldwide biggest event ever.
Zero-downtime upgrade is something PostgreSQL upstream wants to achieve when upgrading from 9.4 to 9.5 -- using cross-version replication. BDR (bi-directional replicatoin) is heading into postgres, which may allow multi-master replication in 9.7.
Simon mentioned Stonebraker's Vision who said that there will be either data warehouse database or transactional databases, but nothing will do both. PostgreSQL is proof that Stonebraker was wrong, because PostgreSQL is both. It was also mentioned that patched-PG projects like PgSQL-XL, that focus on scalability and that will be based on 9.5 at 1Q2016 may be several times faster than 9.6.

Dave Page, Magnus Hagander had the final word that belonged to 2nd Quadrant, which is becoming sustainable open shource development, customer funded company that provides Highly Available Support and RemoteDBA.

I already wrote it was my first PGConf.eu, but since the three days were full of very interesting topics and hallway was full of very interesting fans of PostgreSQL, I'm sure it was not the last one.

Monday, November 23, 2015

Thoughts from PGConf.eu, PostgreSQL Europe Conference 2015, Day 2

This is a continuation of notes from PGConf.eu in Vienna this year. First day notes available here and third day notes available here.

I've started the second day with WAL, Standbys and Postgrs 9.5 by Michael Paquier, which was a morning talk about archiving and warm standby and how the postgresql 9.5 may help here.

Then there was my talk called Database containers in enterprise world. I mentioned there our experiences with containers preparation and how RH takes containers (not as VMs, but rather applications); that all was described rather in lower level of detail, but rather with bigger context. Not many people were presented (Robert Haas in the next room talking about Parallelism in postgresql was just too big concurence, just bad luck in timing), but those who were there, were already familiar with containers a bit, which turned into very nice discussion and many questions in the end. The questiones were mostly about differences between Nulecule and kubernetes templates, docker compose; further questions about Nulecule, that I also roughly presented.

VACUUM, Freezing & Avoiding Wraparound was a talk by Simon Riggs where he talked about high concurency, row visibility, deleting rows that make bloat. He explained the principle of vacuum, how long running queries influence it, how it works actually and why it is that important.

Duo Gabriele Bartolini and Marco Nenciarini talked about logging of huge PostgreSQL data and analysing them, which deserves proper tooling in the first place. Guys from 2nd quadrant were talking about experiences with elastic search + logstash + kibana (ELK stack) in a talk Integrating PostgreSQL with Logstash for real-time monitoring.

Linux tuning to improve PostgreSQL performance by Ilya Kosmodemiansky was a great overview around what everything in kernel we need to take into account when tuning postgresql performance. Most of it was about setting proper sizes of memory pages and buffers.

Tomas Vondra talked once again on PGConf.eu, this time about PostgreSQL Performance on EXT4, XFS, F2FS, BTRFS and ZFS after he did serveral benchmarks of different filesystems. Shortly, ZFS was quite poor in default settings, but it can be improved by fixing pages size. Otherwise, the results are quite comparable (XFS, EXT4 seemed the best though). BTRFS seemed quite bad in read-write bechmark, while XFS nad EXT4 were best again there.
http://www.slideshare.net/fuzzycz/postgresql-on-ext4-xfs-btrfs-and-zfs-54525451

Second day was closed by 90 minutes of lightning talks, that have already become tradition on PostgreSQL conference and strict 5 minute rule makes it really interesting.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Thoughts from PGConf.eu, PostgreSQL Europe Conference 2015, Day 1

It was my first PGConf.eu and it was awesome. My bad that I waited so long to share some of the thoughts, but fixing it now with summary. Links to presentations are located at https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_Conference_Europe_Talks_2015.

The keynote by Tamara Atanasoska called The bigger picture: More then just code mentioned that community project is more about people, code is second. It was also stressed how important it is to be open to new-comers and users. Great eye opener for enybody involved in open-source.

Upcoming PostgreSQL 9.5 Features talk by  Bruce Momjian involved these news: insert on update, aggregate functions enhancements, in-memory performance, JSON manipulation and operations and improvements in foreign data wrappers, which now can be part of sharding now. I really can't wait for PostgreSQL 9.5 GA.

Dockerizing a Larger PostgreSQL Installation: What could possibly go wrong? by Mladen Marinović was really something what I looked for, because containers is now the topic #1 for me.  Mladen demonstrated using containers mostly as VM, basics of Docker were also introduced, since only half of the room were familiar with it. Problems with using cache during `docker build` and locales inside containers were mentioned, but the solutions was rather hacky to me (using date to trick the daemon, instead of straightforward --nocache). Problem with sending signals to process was alse mentioned, which is something we were looking at also during creation of containers for Open Shift.

Mladen uses Ansible for building images and uses several containers for specific actions -- e.g. a separate container for tools (dump/load). They support replication -- host_standby, restart_command (run in separate container) and run on two physical servers. Backups (pg_basebackup + compress) according retention policy - another container.

It was also mentioned that taking back-up from slave is not that easy. Monitoring, that all containers are alive, is done by HA SW. Problem with OOM were also mentioned, that system may kill your container processes, but solution was to use max_connections. Problem with freezing server was then solved by using timeout for every command. Transparent huge pages were mentioned as something not to use -- use normal huge pages instead. Finaly, upgrading to new major versions were mentioned as tough point always.
See more at: https://bitbucket.org/marin/pgconfeu2015/src

DBA's toolbelt by Kaarel Moppel was more a list of possible tools to look at when you mean it seriously with administration of PostgreSQL. So, just repeating the list may be interesting for someone.:
  • docs + pgconfig for configuring
  • pgbench + pgbench-tools for bechmarking
  • pg_activity (top-like) + pg_view + pgstats + pg_stat_statements + pgstattuple + plugins for monitoring systems (nagios) + postgresql-metricks (spitify) for monitoring
  • pgBadger + pg_loggrep - log analyzing
  • postgresql-toolkit - victorinox for postgresql dba
  • pg-utils, pgx_scripts (https://github.com/pgexperts/pgx_scripts), acid-tools
  • pg_locks, pg_stat_activity (locks)
  • pgObserver, pgCluu, many others, based on what we need to do
  • pgadmin4 on the way (backend and web frontend)
  • developer: pgloader, pg_partman, pgpool-II, PL/Proxy
Managing PostgreSQL with Ansible by Gulcin Yildirim was more an introduction of Ansible.
https://github.com/gulcin/pgconfeu2015

Let’s turn your PostgreSQL into columnar store with cstore_fdw by Jan Holčapek introduced interesting plugin, that may convert clasic row-based storage PostgreSQL engine into column storage database by utilizing foreign data wrapper concept. In some cases this may help a lot for the performance, once ready.

Performance improvements in 9.5 and beyond by Tomas Vondra was not only an interesting insight to particular areas that PostgreSQL hackers look at, but also nice motivation to look at aupgrading to 9.5. For example sorting speed-up up to 3-4x in comparisson to 9.4 in some cases is something I wouldn't really expect. Another comparisson of BRIN vs. BTREE indexes showed that performance is quite similar, but BRIN is much much much smaller. Another set of graphs showed how parallel scan allows to speed-up selects up to half of the time.

Notes from second day are here and from third day are here.

Saturday, November 21, 2015

How we've fixed upgrade path for CentOS 6 Software Collections

Short meesage for those who don't have time:
Software Collectoins for CentOS 6 are ready for upgrade from older rebuilds.

Now full story for those who care. Btw. this all is related to work done by SCLo SIG group that is part of CentOS (read more at http://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/SCLo).

A bit of history for beginning. Shortly after first RHSCL 1.0 release, CentOS rebuilds were prepared and since then they are available under:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/SCL/x86_64/

However, keeping these rebuilds in sync with RHSCL content hasn't been easy task. With introduction of Java packages in collections, this task became even more tricky, which means these collections were not updated for long time. With that said, someone would expect there won't be problem with upgrade path, in other words that the new RPMs, that the SCLo SIG group is about to release, will update the older RPMs smoothly.

Well, not always. The original RPMs used ".el6.centos.alt" as %dist tag, while new builds use just ".el6" and that evolves in cases where python27-python-bson-2.5.2-4.el6.centos.alt.x86_64 > python27-python-bson-2.5.2-4.el6.x86_64, even if those packages have same Release tag in RPM SPEC. That obviously means the packages won't update smoothly.

Solution is quite simple in this case -- use higher Release in RPM SPEC. In some packages, this was already done, because some of the packages received update since original inclusion. In other cases we solve it by adding ".scX" (X is number) suffix to the Release tag. The ".scX" was chosen deliberately since ".scX.el6" is higher (alphabetically) than .el6.

Btw. for cases we need to build package more times before final build (bootstraping), we use suffix ".bsX", which means we can build package without any Release suffix in the end, because ".bsX.el6" < ".el6".

Anyway, this post was meant to let you know that upgrading of el6 packages from originally built RPMs is something we care about.

To verify it works, I've installed all the packages from original repository, then ran "yum update" and that evolved in proper update of all packages. I took that as proof it should work fine in your case as well. If there are still some issues, let us know.

Enjoy Software Collections on CentOS!