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An early look at Postgres 14: Performance and monitoring Improvements

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Re: An early look at Postgres 14: Performance and monitoring Improvements

#91
post #79

What's going to be the vitess of Postgres? Seems to be the "last" missing piece? Or is that not a focus and fit for PG?

That would be Citus: https://www.citusdata.com/

Which is now owned by Microsoft so except to see enterprise support disappear.

Instead you are likely to be forced to use a cloud hosted PostgreSQL instance in order to get HA/clustering.

Re: An early look at Postgres 14: Performance and monitoring Improvements

#92
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pg_upgrade [0] is an official part of postgres and does the binary inplace upgrade for you. You should obviously test before running in production, but it has worked perfectly for us when upgrading a 10+TB cluster from pg11 to pg13 [0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgupgrade.html

Not totally ideal if you're using containers as it requires the binaries of the old and new version, unless I'm missing something.

[deleted]

Re: An early look at Postgres 14: Performance and monitoring Improvements

#93

Any progress on high availability deployments yet? Or does it still rely on problematic, 3rd party tools? Last time I was responsible for setting up a HA Postgres cluster it was a garbage fire, but that was nearly 10 years ago now. I ask every so often to see if it has improved and each time, so far, the answer has been no.

If you want HA use AWS RDS, Azure Citus, GCP Cloud SQL.

Otherwise use MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB, Cassandra etc if you want to run it on your own.

Any other database that invested in a native and supported HA/clustering implementation.

Re: An early look at Postgres 14: Performance and monitoring Improvements

#94

Postgres is one of those pieces of software that’s so much better than anything else, it’s really incredible. I wonder if it’s even possible for competitors to catch up at this point - there’s not a lot of room for improvement in architecture of relational databases any more. I’m starting to think that Postgres is going to be with us for decades maybe even centuries. Do any other entrenched software projects come to…

I'm an enormous fan of Postgres, it's my default go-to RDBMS. But the memory expense of connections is a huge issue and this article doesn't convince me that it's solved. The machine being used for this benchmark has 96 vCPUs, 192G of RAM, and costs $3k/mo. My business runs just fine on a 3.75G, 1 vCPU instance. But idle connections eat up a huge amount of RAM and I sometimes find myself hitting the limits when a loa…

I agree - the disparity between the cost of idle connections in Postgres vs MSSQL is hampering our ability to migrate.

Re: An early look at Postgres 14: Performance and monitoring Improvements

#95
post #80

Another exciting feature in PG14 is the new JSONB syntax[0], which makes it easy to update deep JSON values - UPDATE table SET some_jsonb_column['person']['bio']['age'] = '99'; [0] https://erthalion.info/2021/03/03/subscripting/

Gods, but this is fabulous!

JSONB capabilities in Postgres are amazing, but the syntax is really annoying - for example, I'm forever mixing up `->` and `->>`. This new syntax feels far more intuitive.

Re: An early look at Postgres 14: Performance and monitoring Improvements

#96

Postgres is one of those pieces of software that’s so much better than anything else, it’s really incredible. I wonder if it’s even possible for competitors to catch up at this point - there’s not a lot of room for improvement in architecture of relational databases any more. I’m starting to think that Postgres is going to be with us for decades maybe even centuries. Do any other entrenched software projects come to…

There's a ton of room for improvement in the architecture of relational databases. This isn't a dig against Postgres, or ignoring how difficult it will be to get a new system to the same level of maturity. But databases designed natively for cloud/clustering, SSDs, (pmem soon perhaps), etc are quite a bit different. There's enormous simplifications and performance gains possible.

There's been a lot of exciting work in this area over the last decade or so. Andy Pavlo's classes are great surveys of the latest work: https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2020/

CosmosDB is an example of a relational (multi paradigm properly) database with a quite different architecture vs the classic design, that's moved into production status quite rapidly.

FaunaDB and CockroachDB are moving with solid momentum too.

Re: An early look at Postgres 14: Performance and monitoring Improvements

#97
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend the book "SQL Performance Explained" by Markus Winand: https://sql-performance-explained.com/ It covers all major databases and is a good start to dive into database interna and how to interpret output from query analyzers. Other than that, I highly recommend joining the mailing list and IRC (#postgresql on libera.chat). Lots of valuable tricks being shared there by people with decades of experience.

Did freenode get renamed?

Not renamed, but a number of Freenode channels and admins moved to libera.chat recently due to non-technical IRC drama / politics over "ownership".

Re: An early look at Postgres 14: Performance and monitoring Improvements

#98

Postgres is one of those pieces of software that’s so much better than anything else, it’s really incredible. I wonder if it’s even possible for competitors to catch up at this point - there’s not a lot of room for improvement in architecture of relational databases any more. I’m starting to think that Postgres is going to be with us for decades maybe even centuries. Do any other entrenched software projects come to…

I like to say that "Postgres is a great default". It's generally very good, and also very adaptable to special purposes, so it covers a wide range of use cases. But saying "so much better" is too strong.

It's the inevitable circlejerk we get with every PostgreSQL post on HN.

Which is a shame because it means the legitimate and serious faults (i.e. lack of native HA/clustering) just get waved away.

Re: An early look at Postgres 14: Performance and monitoring Improvements

#99
post #88
post #80

Another exciting feature in PG14 is the new JSONB syntax[0], which makes it easy to update deep JSON values - UPDATE table SET some_jsonb_column['person']['bio']['age'] = '99'; [0] https://erthalion.info/2021/03/03/subscripting/

Wow is this for real? That is such a big quality of life change! Happy to see it!

Not much different from some_jsonb#>>'{some,path}' and once you add the need to convert out of jsonb to text, you'll not be saving any characters either. At least for queries.

For updates, it looks nice I guess.

Re: An early look at Postgres 14: Performance and monitoring Improvements

#100

Postgres is one of those pieces of software that’s so much better than anything else, it’s really incredible. I wonder if it’s even possible for competitors to catch up at this point - there’s not a lot of room for improvement in architecture of relational databases any more. I’m starting to think that Postgres is going to be with us for decades maybe even centuries. Do any other entrenched software projects come to…

There's a ton of room for improvement in the architecture of relational databases. This isn't a dig against Postgres, or ignoring how difficult it will be to get a new system to the same level of maturity. But databases designed natively for cloud/clustering, SSDs, (pmem soon perhaps), etc are quite a bit different. There's enormous simplifications and performance gains possible. There's been a lot of exciting work i…

There are also technologies like NVMe over Fabric/RDMA, eBPF, XDP, io_uring etc which are just starting to get traction and are game changers for performance. None of which are being used.

All of these require a different architecture so expect to see newer databases push things even further.

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