This presentation explores a broad cross-section of enterprise Postgres deployments to identify key usage patterns and reveals important aspects of performance, scalability, and availability including: • Challenges organizations encounter most frequently during the stages of database development, deployment and maintenance • Tuning parameters used most frequently to improve performance of production databases • Frequently problematic database maintenance processes and configuration parameters • Most commonly-used database back-up and recovery strategies You will gain useful insights about how peer organizations are developing, deploying and supporting production Postgres databases, and will learn some best practices for preparing for deployment or growth.

1. Postgres in Production –
Enterprise Best Practices
© 2014 EDB All rights reserved. 1

2. Objectives
• Explore key Postgres usage patterns, to expose
− Challenges users face in adoption, development, deployment
and maintenance
− Frequently used tuning parameters
− Common database maintenance practices
− Database back-up and recovery strategies
• Provide empirical data to help you anticipate needs
during your database lifecycles
• Share ideas and resources to help you address
problems before they occur
© 2014 EDB All rights reserved. 2

3. Agenda
• EnterpriseDB Overview (quick)
• Postgres Support Experiences
Explore what kinds of issues your peers are experiencing with
Postgres, and when they’re encountering those issues
• Database Health Checks
Share what we’ve learned in the field about how Postgres
databases are deployed, tuned and supported
• Summary and Useful Resources
• Q&A
© 2014 EDB All rights reserved. 3

4. Brief EDB Overview
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5. Postgres Plus
Advanced Server Postgres Plus
Management Performance
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Cloud Database
High Availability
REMOTE
DBA 24x7
SUPPORT
PROFESSIONAL
SERVICES
TRAINING
EDB Serves
All Your Postgres Needs
PostgreSQL
Security

6. POSTGRES
innovation
Services
& training
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ENTERPRISE
reliability
24/7
support
Enterprise-class
features & tools
Indemnification
Product
road-map
Control
Thousands
of developers
Fast
development
cycles
Low cost
No vendor
lock-in
Advanced
features
Enabling commercial
adoption of Postgres

7. Postgres Support Experiences
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 7

8. Why We Analyze Support Tickets
• Adoption of Postgres is growing fast
− More and more Postgres users are not not ‘dyed in the wool’ Postgres
users – they come from Oracle, MS SQL, DB2, etc.
• Postgres is moving into complex, mission-critical applications
− Question patterns are changing from simple to complex
− Expertise level is changing – when the customer calls, it is with a
(more) difficult problem or urgent issue
• How do we make Postgres users even more successful?
− Targeted white papers
− Targeted training for support team
− Pro-active training for users as part of our customer enablement
process
− Balanced product strategy of new features, new capabilities and
usability
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 8

9. Ticket Volumes & Multi Year Growth
• Q1 2014: ~ 2500 total customers
• Analysis in this presentation is based on a representative
sample of tickets raised over a 12 months period
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10. Tickets and Platforms
Observations
• Postgres Plus Advanced Server: Strong emphasis on proprietary or commercially
supported OSS
• PostgreSQL: Significantly less emphasis on proprietary or commercially supported
OSS – even though the customer has commercially supported Postgres
Distribution
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 10

11. When do customers call?
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 11

12. What Do Customers Call About?
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
POC Dev Deployment Maintenance
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 12
Tuning
Product Awareness
How to
Enhancements
Corruption
Bug
# Tickets Phase
Category POC Dev Deployment Maintenance Grand Total
Bug 8% 22% 9% 7% 10%
Corruption 0% 0% 0% 6% 2%
Enhancements 3% 4% 1% 0% 1%
How to 41% 33% 41% 29% 35%
Product Awareness 46% 39% 44% 39% 41%
Tuning 3% 2% 5% 19% 10%
Grand Total 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%

13. Where Do Users Need Help
# Tickets Phase
Category POC Dev Deployment Maintenance Grand Total
Connectors 0% 2% 1% 0% 3%
Bug 0% 0% 0% 0% 1%
How to 0% 1% 0% 0% 1%
Product Awareness 0% 1% 0% 0% 1%
Database 10% 9% 17% 37% 73%
Bug 1% 2% 1% 2% 6%
Corruption 0% 0% 0% 2% 2%
Enhancements 0% 0% 0% 0% 1%
How to 4% 3% 6% 10% 23%
Product Awareness 4% 3% 8% 15% 31%
Tuning 0% 0% 1% 7% 9%
Replication 1% 4% 4% 2% 12%
Bug 0% 1% 0% 0% 2%
How to 0% 0% 3% 1% 4%
Product Awareness 1% 2% 1% 0% 4%
Tuning 0% 0% 0% 1% 1%
Utilities 1% 3% 6% 3% 12%
Bug 0% 1% 1% 0% 2%
Enhancements 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
How to 1% 1% 3% 1% 6%
Product Awareness 0% 1% 3% 1% 5%
Grand Total 12% 17% 28% 42% 100%
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 13

14. Select Top questions (not in rank order)
Deployment/Database/Product Awareness & How To
− How to set up connection pooling?
− How to set up Hot Standby and Streaming Replica?
− How to add table spaces?
− How to partition?
− How to upgrade from major version?
Maintenance/Database/Product Awareness & How To
− How to find bloat in tables & indexes?
− How to enable auditing selectively without performance impact?
− What are the effects of changes to the values of postgresql.conf
file parameters wal_writer_delay, bgwriter_delay?
− What is the correct configuration of hba_conf?
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 14

15. Best Practices and Lessons from Support
• The majority of questions arise after PoC and
Development
• Deployment and Maintenance are the more
challenging phases
• Plan early to understand necessary practices
− Backup, recovery, high availability strategies
− Configuration parameter tuning to support growth
− Vacuum and bloat
− Connection pooling
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 15

16. Lessons Learned from the AHC
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 16

17. Architectural Health Check
• Systematic top-to-bottom review of the customer’s
Postgres production installation
• Identifies issues and improvement opportunities in:
− Performance
− Scalability and support for business and data growth
− Availability – Backup strategies, recovery, replication and
failover
− Maintenance and tuning
− Upgrades
• The following analysis is based on a set of 20 AHCs
executed in 2013
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 17

18. 100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Top Database Parameter Adjustments – Ordered by Frequency
effec ve_cache_size
Top Database Parameter Adjustments - Ordered by Frequency
wal_buffers
maintenance_work_mem
shared_buffers
bgwriter_lru_maxpages
work_mem
random_page_cost
checkpoint_segments
bgwriter_lru_mul plier
cpu_tuple_cost
checkpoint_comple on_target
checkpoint_ meout
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 18
Red bars:
experts expected top parameters,
including vacuum_cost_limit,
log_line_prefix,
log_min_duration_statement,
log_checkpoints
checkpoint_warning
autovacuum_vacuum_cost_delay
autovacuum_vacuum_threshold
prefix
waitsstatement
factor
line_lock_scale_log_log_dura vacuum_on_log_autovacuum_min_autovacuum_nap me
log_autovacuum_min_dura on

19. Kernel Parameters
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 19

20. Backup and Standby
Snapshot
7%
Backup Approach
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Standby Approach
hot
47%
None
18%
cold
12%
warm
23%
Physical
Only
36%
Logical
Only
29%
FS
Physical
and
Logical
14%
None
14%
43% of customers could not execute
PITR (prior to AHC) – some had NO
backup in place
30% of customers would have been
slow or unable to recover from failure

21. Maintenance Tasks
Missing
Indexes
Bloated Tables
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 21
Unused
Indexes
39%
Bloated
Indexes
30%
13%
9%
Missing
PK
9%
Bloat management
(43%) is a key
production
problem
specific to
Postgres

22. Observations from the AHCs
• Majority of Postgres production deployments are on
Linux based OS
• Storage system is a key deployment consideration –
DAS/SAN/NFS
• OS System Adjustments (dirty_background_ratio &
dirty_ratio) are also a major adjustment (70% & 45%)
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 22

23. Stage: post-production
Primary Issue:
• Outage due to replication
failure - insufficient log info to
determine true root cause
Potential Pain Points
• Concerns have reached limits
of scale and meeting
anticipated growth demands
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 23
Recommendations
• Backup and recovery strategies
• Implement continuous archive
recovery in addition to streaming
replication
• Revised backup strategy with PITR
• Tune auto-vacuum settings and
manually vacuum large tables
• Indexes – create concurrent
indexes, REINDEX to reduce bloat
• Parameter tuning – various for
kernel, memory settings and WALs
AHC Case Study #1
Use Case: on-line advertising service with hosted chat

24. Stage: pre-deployment
Primary Issues:
• Performance in returning
results and timeouts
• No backup strategy in place
Potential Pain Points
• Expected data volume growth
and increased analysis –
scalability concerns
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 24
Recommendations
• Kernel param updates (8)-
kernel.shmmax, kernel.shmall,
vm.dirty_ratio,
vm.dirty_background_ratio,…
• Database param changes (11) -
effective_cache_size,
shared_buffers,
bgwriter_lru_maxpages,
wal_buffers, work_mem, …
• Re-architect specific heavily-used
database function
• Detailed backup and availability
strategies
AHC Case Study #2
Use Case: data warehouse reporting at customer sites

25. Stage: post-production
Primary Issues:
• System performance
• Running out of connections
• Slow queries/ locked tables
• Advice on new SW release
Potential Pain Points
• Concern for increased
workloads and scalability
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 25
Recommendations
• max_connections was actually too
high, work_mem too low
• Increase checkpoint parameters
− checkpoint_segments,
checkpoint_timeout,
checkpoint_completion_
target, checkpoint_warning
• Tune storage-related params (SAN)
- DB, memory, file system
work_mem, random_page_cost
• Upgrade for performance and
security improvements
• As workload increases, increase
RAM and re-tune related memory
config. parameters
AHC Case Study #3
Use Case: claims mgmt. system and reporting application

26. Summary and Useful Resources
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 26

27. Summary
• Postgres users consistently experience different kinds
of challenges throughout the database lifecycle
− Postgres product knowledge is a critical need at all lifecycle
stages
• Many DBAs would benefit from better knowledge of
tuning Postgres for their storage infrastructures
• Tuning databases early in the lifecycle can save a lot of
time, hassle and user friction after they’re deployed
• Many organizations lack appropriate backup and
recovery strategies
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 27

28. Backup and Recovery Strategies
• Why do you need backup and recovery? Backup and
Recovery Strategies protect you in case of:
− Catastrophic Device Failure
− Site Failure
− Maintenance
− Operator Error
− Compliance
− Data Corruption
• Key takeaways:
− Logical backup provides granularity in objects (tables, table
spaces, databases); Physical backups provide granularity in
time for PITR.
− Understand requirements before diving into technology
solution
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 28

29. Backup and Recovery Strategies
• Postgres provides
− Logical backup (pg_dump)
− Binary/physical backup (Filesystem Snapshots &
pg_basebackup)
− WAL (write ahead logs)
− Streaming replication
− Delayed replication
• Advanced solutions, such as RHCS, Veritas Clustering ,
EFM and EDB BART - (now in Beta) augment
the basic capabilities
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 29

30. Architectural Health Check
• Performance, Scalability, Availability
• Three-day in-depth Postgres database review
• Analysis of platform, database architecture and application usage
• Provides tuning and management guidance based on EDB’s
expert best practices
Get an Architectural Health Check when you are
− Not 100% sure about your backup/recovery strategy
− Unsure your database is optimally tuned for your apps
− Moving Postgres databases to the Cloud
− Upgrading your servers to multi-core, high memory devices
− Experiencing high growth in application usage
− Experiencing deterioration of read and/or write throughput
http://enterprisedb.com/services/packaged-services/health-check
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 30

31. For more information about an Architectural Health Check,
please visit www.enterprisedb.com/ahc
or email us - sales@enterprisedb.com
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 31