postgresql

pgbench retry for repeatable read transactions — first (re)tries

Trying a no-patch solution for pgbench running on repeatable read transactions, using a custom script with PL/pgSQL

In a previous post I was running pgBench on YugaByteDB in serializable isolation level. But Serializable is optimistic and requires that the transactions are re-tried when failed. But pgBench has no retry mode. There was a patch proposed in several commit fests for that, but patch acceptance is a long journey in PostgreSQL:

WIP: Pgbench Errors and serialization/deadlock retries

MVCC in Oracle vs. PostgreSQL, and a little no-bloat beauty

Databases that are ACID compliant must provide consistency, even when there are concurrent updates.

Let’s take an example:

• at 12:00 I have 1200$ in my account
• at 12:00 My banker runs long report to display the accounts balance. This report will scan the ACCOUNT tables for the next 2 minutes
• at 12:01 an amount of 500$ is transferred to my account
• at 12:02 the banker’s report has fetched all rows

What balance is displayed in my banker’s report?

TL;DR: Everything is different about transaction behavior. This may also change your ideas about “database independent” applications.

I like to explain some PostgreSQL concepts from an oracle DBA point of view. There are many things that are different in the two RDBMS and it is important to understand them.

Auto commit

Here is a short example where I create a table, insert one row and rollback:

TL;DR: AUTOCOMMIT is required when calling a procedure which has some COMMIT inside.

In version 11 PostgreSQL has introduced the possibility to start, commit or rollback transactions in PL/pgSQL procedures (stored or anonymous). Most of the demos have been run from the psql default AUTOCOMMIT on, like 2ndQuadrant and dbi-services blogs. But Bryn Llewellyn (YugaByte) raised an issue when running without AUTOCOMMIT OFF (which, coming from Oracle, looks like the right choice). Here is my investigation on this.

custom vs. generic plans

With my Oracle database background, I know how important it is to balance the pros and cons of using bind variables (parameterized queries) vs. literals.

TL;DR — By default PostgreSQL ResultSet is not a server cursor but a client buffer. The whole result is fetched before the first next() call.

It is usually a good idea to start with default settings rather than trying to ‘tune’ any possible parameter. Defaults are often suited to the most common cases. However, there’s a big exception to it when using JDBC drivers: the default fetch size is probably not the right setting. Here is an example with the same Java code to show the fetching behavior in Oracle and PostgreSQL.

Java example

Here is my Java code which is exactly the same for Oracle and PostgresSQL

Running pgBench on YugaByte DB 1.3

My first test on this Open Source SQL distributed database.

Did you hear about YugaByteDB, a distributed database with an architecture similar to Google Spanner, using PostgreSQL as the query layer?

I started to follow when I’ve heard that Bryn Llewellyn, famous PL/SQL and EBR product manager, left Oracle to be their developer advocate. And YugaByteDB got more attention recently when announcing that their product license is now 100% Open Source.

Introduction

Now that we have the ability to sample and record the active sessions and their associated queryid with the pg_active_session_history view (see this blog post), it would be interesting to have insights about the queries statistics at the time the sessions were active.

PostgreSQL provides the queries statistics with the pg_stat_statements view. We could query the pg_active_session_history and the pg_stat_statements views and join them on the queryid field, but the queries statistics would be:

As a Database Developer or Database Administrator, it becomes increasingly unlikely that you will work with only one platform.

It’s quite useful to have one single tool to handle multiple different database platforms. And that’s exactly the ambition of DbVisualizer.

As a hypothetical scenario, let’s assume you are a database admin who works on a project to migrate from Oracle to EDB Postgres and Exasol.

The goal might be to replace the corporate Oracle database landscape, moving the OLTP part to EDB Postgres and the DWH / Analytics part to Exasol.

Instead of having to switch constantly between say SQL Developer, psql and EXAplus, a more efficient approach would be using DbVisualizer for all three.

I’m looking forward to the Seattle PostgreSQL User Group meetup this Thursday (June 20, 2019) at 5:30pm! We’re going to get an early sneak peek at what’s coming later this year in PostgreSQL’s next major release. The current velocity of development in this open source community is staggering and this is an exciting and valuable opportunity to keep up with where PostgreSQL is going next.

One thing that’s a bit unusual about this meetup is the new location and late timing of the announcement. I think it’s worth a quick blog post to mention the location: for some people this new location might be a little more accessible than the normal spot (over at the Fred Hutch).