What are your favorite PostgreSQL performance resources?
If you were to gird up your loins and learn PostgreSQL performance optimization from scratch, but already knowing where to find the articles and manuals and stuff online, what URLs would you be visiting? What core bits of PostgreSQL would you focus on understanding the most deeply? What books would you buy?
Note: if your comment doesn’t appear it probably went into the spam queue because of links. I’ll retrieve it, don’t worry.
the postgresql wiki has several pages dedicated to this topic, with further links:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Performance_Optimization
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Tuning_Your_PostgreSQL_Server
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Community_Disk_Tuning_Guide
Lukas
13 Dec 08 at 7:44 pm
Just noticed that you already seem to be aware of the postgresql wiki, but I guess some of your readers might not be aware of the growing content in that wiki.
Lukas
13 Dec 08 at 7:47 pm
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Performance_Optimization
http://www.depesz.com/
http://planetpostgresql.org/
Ms. Anthrope
13 Dec 08 at 8:21 pm
Don’t give up. There is still hope. Eventually things will get better.
Mark Callaghan
14 Dec 08 at 12:18 am
@Mark: I see no indication of this at all. Overall I think there have been too many years of lackluster testing. And this predates MySQL’s IPO efforts, it just got worse then, because it meant that on top of badly tested code, a lot of even worse tested code was placed.
Now Drizzle is fine and dandy, but lets be honest, who of us is doing “cloud computing” frequently? If you look at the current MySQL user base its close to zilch .. maybe growing. So I also do not see Drizzle as my savior.
That being said, MySQL still works fine for most of my projects. I just do not see myself recommending it to young developers. And I also do not see myself using it in 5 years down the road.
Lukas
14 Dec 08 at 6:13 am
Mark, it’s not that. People think Percona is a MySQL performance consulting company. MySQL is only *one* tool and we don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves. There’s a destination to that road — just ask any COBOL programmer — there’s enough demand for COBOL programmers even today.
On the other hand, don’t take this as an official announcement that Percona is moving into PostgreSQL consulting. It just reflects my interest in Postgres, which everyone who knows me knows about. I’m just so darn busy that I haven’t had time to pursue it a lot.
Xaprb
14 Dec 08 at 3:03 pm
Baron,
Percona has already pigeonholed itself. You do much more than performance consulting.
Mark Callaghan
14 Dec 08 at 3:14 pm
Yeah, tell me about it :-) But how to explain in an elevator speech the totality of who we are and what we do? Believe me, it’s something we have spent a lot of time on. Language and terminology just don’t make it easy — everywhere I’ve turned to try to explain the breadth and depth of what we do, I find words boxing us in.
Xaprb
14 Dec 08 at 3:20 pm
Maybe you could claim to do scalability, performance, availability and manageability consulting. Then you could claim to be the SPAM experts.
Mark Callaghan
14 Dec 08 at 7:18 pm
That’s still only a small subset of what we do. We’re dropping the SPAM consulting, though ;-)
Xaprb
14 Dec 08 at 7:54 pm
Baron,
I’ll revamp and update http://www.powerpostgresql.com RSN. Really.
Josh Berkus
14 Dec 08 at 9:11 pm
[...] And now—hey what’s MySQL maven Baron Schwartz doing with a Postgres post on xaprb? He’s asking, what are your favorite PostgreSQL performance resources? [...]
Log Buffer #128: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
19 Dec 08 at 2:28 pm
We try to cater to using PostgreSQL with other tools both commercial and non-commercial. Also a lot of newbie tips.
http://www.postgresonline.com
Regina
24 Dec 08 at 8:48 am
I like PostgreSQL Performance Tuning
Anonymous
7 Jan 09 at 3:35 pm