I find myself discussing and explaining sychronous_commit with many PostgreSQL users, especially with novice users. So, I thought of noting down all the key points as a blog post which will be useful for more users. Recently I got an opportunity to talk about some related topics in our PostgreSQL Percona Tech Days.
What Is sychronous_commit All About?
This is the parameter by which we can decide when a transaction-commit can be acknowledged back to the client as successful.
PostgreSQL: Simple C Extension Development for a Novice User (and Performance Advantages)
One of the great features of PostgreSQL is its extendability. My colleague and senior PostgreSQL developer Ibar has blogged about developing an extension with much broader capabilities including callback functionality. In this blog post, I am trying to address a complete novice user who has never tried but wants to develop a simple function with business logic. Towards the end of the blog post, I want to show how lightweight the function is by doing simple benchmarking, which is repeatable and should act as a strong justification for why end-users should do this kind of development.
Generally, PostgreSQL and extension developers work on a PostgreSQL source build. For a novice user, that may not be required. Instead, dev/devel packages provided for the Linux distro would be sufficient. Assuming that you have installed PostgreSQL already, the following steps can get you the additional development libraries required.
Managing Multiple PostgreSQL Instances on Ubuntu/Debian
Introduction
Those DBAs who are experts in one database system look for other database systems to have "similar features." It is a human tendency to look at any new technology and compare it with a world they are familiar with.
Most of the time, I keep addressing Oracle DBAs who are looking for similar features or setup in PostgreSQL, but this time it is for MySQL DBA. MySQL historically ships mysqld_multi to manage multiple instances of MySQL on a server. Even though this is not a core feature in MySQL, but rather a wrapper, I understand that it is something widely used and my colleague Fernando blogged about it.