Scale 14x recap

I went to SCALE mainly for PostgreSQL@Scale – Joe Conway’s grown this annual add-on into a two-day, two-track event.

The new venue is a huge improvement, even though the walk from the hotel was a bit longer than I expected. There are a lot more accessible-on-foot food options.

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For my session, I gave an updated version of last year’s “RDS Postgres: A Journey down the Amazon”.

If you’re using RDS and aren’t keeping up with your monitoring, please be aware of the current required OS update.  You can view & schedule required updates via the web console; here are the corresponding cli commands:

aws rds describe-pending-maintenance-actions \
--filters Name=db-instance-id,Values=mydb,mydb1,mydb2

aws rds apply-pending-maintenance-action \
--resource-identifier arn:aws:rds:[region]:[account]:db:[db-name] \
--apply-action system-update \ 
--opt-in-type next-maintenance

I find JSON and text output more useful for these types of tasks; I’ll cover that in a later post.

Accessing RDS Pg logs is kind of a sticking point for some people, me included. (I _really_ want an easy way to get them into Splunk.)
Here’s Denish Patel’s work using the rds cli, and a quick bash script I threw together, which uses the aws cli.

Based on the quick headcount I took at the beginning of the session, attendees were about 2/3 devs, 1/3 DBAs. We also had a couple of people from the Amazon RDS team; it’s always nice to know I have backup in the audience! ;)

A couple of folks had questions after my talk and I didn’t catch up with them in the booth. If that is you, feel free to leave a comment here, or email me.

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Other talks I attended:
Jim Mlodgenski’s Debugging PL/PgSQL contained some good tips on use of RAISE NOTICE and what not to do. I installed pl_profiler and started using it the next afternoon.

Xof’s JSON Home Improvement included advice on when to use JSON vs JSONB, or maybe even neither :) If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that these kinds of discussions just end in me making plans for more benchmarking…

Peter Geoghegan’s UPSERT use cases  covered a good range of material from beginning to “We can do WHAT now?” and made me realize I can always improve my SQL skills.

I’ve been hearing about ToroDB  but hadn’t attended one of Alvaro’s talks yet. Very basically, it’s a Pg-backed Mongo interface. They take the json data and explode it out into sub-documents. Then there’s a table that stores the structure _in json_. It both blew my mind & had me smacking my forehead “of course!”

It is in alpha, so this applies.
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Slides for talks are (or will be) on the Pg wiki.  We do rely on speakers to load their own slides, so if you are after something in particular, please ask & I will remind them. :)

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I’m already looking forward to next year, and hope I get to go ice skating then!

SCALE 13x and “Yes, you still need a DBA”

Last weekend, I got to give a talk at SCALE‘s LA PgDay for the second year in a row. PGDay was two days this year, and unfortunately I had to miss Thursday – looks like I missed some great talks, too, dangit!

I reprised my RDS talk from PDXPUG’s January meeting. It certainly sparked some interesting discussions later.

(If you are too shy to ask questions in my talk, it is totally ok to come up afterwards and ask them, or stop by the Postgres booth & talk to me. That’s what I’m there for!)

I mentioned something in my talk that I want to throw out here because it’s been coming up in conversations recently:

If you have production data that you want to protect, you need a database adminstrator. Even if you are using a managed database service (RDS, Heroku, what have you), you need someone to:

– Choose an appropriate instance size for your workload
– Configure Postgres appropriately (as much as is possible on a managed service, anyway)
– Secure and audit databases
– Ensure data quality
– Tune queries (e.g. figure out what in [Sam Hill] the ORM is doing)
– Mentor devs
– …add your own here…

None of these tasks go away just because you’re using a managed database solution. You still need someone who can hop in there & get her hands dirty. You may disagree, but please keep this list handy http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/.