#PGWest 2011 - Using vFabric Postgres - A DB User's Perspective

Here are my slides from my #PGWest 2011 Presentation " Using vFabric Postgres - A DB User's Perspective" for vPostgres Databases as  deployed by vFabric Data Director.

Next Stop: #PgWest 2011 - San Jose

Returned back from a great #pgopen in Chicago. It was nice to also see and meet again senior VMware executives, PostgreSQL community members and lot of folks (aka customers or potential customers ) who use PostgreSQL as key databases in their IT setup  in the conference.

Next stop now is #PgWest 2011 in San Jose starting on Septeber 27,2011. This year again #PgWest is in San Jose, California.

At this conference, I am presenting my first ever "Using vPostgres - A DB User perspective". The gist of this presentation is on how to use the vFabric Postgres client with the vFabric Postgres server deployed by vFabric Data Director. There are some small differences on how the client works compared to community PostgreSQL  and we will go over those in the session on exactly how it works, and see on how you use it for running and developing your own applications with it.

Also Alex Mirgorodskiy, VMware will be first time presenting in a PostgreSQL conference (that I am aware of at this point of time) on "vFabric Postgres Database Internals".  In this session Alex will go over the subtle tansparent changes which makes vFabric Postgres so easy to deploy, manage and perform in the vFabric Data Director world. Not to steal his thunder but this will cover the new Elastic Database Memory in detail.

Bill Hodak, VMware will present  about  vFabric Data Director itself on how it leverages the features of PostgreSQL and provide a management framework over it to provide enterprise framework and provide self-service features making it easy for even folks who donot know a lot about PostgreSQL database itself to deploy, tune, monitor, backup, restore, clone the database instances.

And to give an overview of VMware's commitment to PostgreSQL Community, Charles Fan, Sr.VP - VMware R&D will be presenting the keynote at #PgWest 2011.

Overall pretty excited about the conference and  to meet lot of new people in the bay area.

Running PostgreSQL on Virtual Environments - #pgopen 2011

Slides from my presentation  at Postgres Open 2011 (#pgopen11) in Chicago.

Next Stop: Postgres Open 2011 - Chicago

Soon I will be in Chicago for Postgres Open 2011. Here I will be presenting once again 
"Running PostgreSQL on Virtualized Environments"  on Thurday - 11:30am in the Cotillion Ballroom (according to the current schedule).

The title should really be "Running Community PostgreSQL on Virtualized Environments" since this presentation really applies to the experiences of running community PostgreSQL in Virtual Machines.  Most of the things in the presentation should really be a checklist which helps you get the most of PostgreSQL in VMs. Of course depending on the VM and the underlying infrastructure, your mileage may vary.

Overall I am also looking forward to attend other sessions (besides mine of course) . Greg Smith has couple of sessions which sounds interesting. There is key note by  Charles Fan on Friday  (that should be no brainer for me). Probably the most interesting to me is "Unlocking the Postgres Lock Manager" by Bruce Momjian which definitely is in line of my interest (since I try to control/avoid/reduce lock contentions and LWLocks in benchmarks which actually lead to my past presentation in pgcon on "Understanding Postgres LWLocks").

Definitely looking forward for the trip.

VMware vFabric Data Director, VMware vFabric Postgres and CloudFoundry

Today I am finally pleased to see that we are finally moving out of stealth mode.

VMware announced vFabric Data Director at VMworld 2011 along with vFabric Postgres (vPostgres).  You will find lot of information already in the press release.

VMware vFabric Data Director


vFabric Data Director is a new VMware software product that enables enterprises to offer Database-as-a-Service. vPostgres is the the first database supported on vFabric Data Director.
It is  a self-service product which  takes the repetitive tasks of setting up a database right from virtual bare-metal to a fully running databases in minutes with features that you expect with an Enterprise quality database (deploying, monitoring, backup, restore, resizing, cloning and many other features). It helps to reduce the database sprawl and increases DBA productivity to handle large number of databases. It extends the vSphere platform to now include a data tier.

You can find the product document, a product-demo and other information on the resource page of  vFabric Data Director.

VMware vFabric Postgres (vPostgres)


vFabric Postgres is VMware's version of PostgreSQL. vPostgres is optimized for running on vSphere platforms. It is based on PostgreSQL 9.0. However there are some transparent changes which are significant in overall user experience.  Lets go over few of these key features

• vFabric Postgres Elastic Database Memory: vPostgres Elastic database memory allows dynamic and seamless adaption of bufferpool in response to changing workloads on the hypervisor.  In traditional implementation, if you take out memory, the guest VMs  performance will goes down the drain. Most cloud users will have seen the symptoms for sure.  With vPostgres Elastic database memory , the effective bufferpool shrinks based on memory pressure dynamically and allows the overall system to be more graceful to this changing memory pressures.  This feature reduces the   over-the-cliff drop in performance observed frequently in Cloud deployments of  databases.

• Dynamic Checkpoint Tuning: In vPostgres, the priority is given to checkpoint_timeout which is referred to as Recovery Time Objective. In order to do the right balance between this Recovery Time Objective and overall performance, it dynamically shifts checkpoint_segments to keep a fine balance of adherence to RTO, performance and diskspace for WAL Logs. This allows reduction of manual tuning of checkpoints and allow the database server to dynamically find an optimum point based on changing workload.

• vPostgres also has some specific features when used with vFabric Data Director. vFabric  Data Director allows to change resources (vCPU, memory) set for a particular database. vData Director can then auto-tune the database based on the changed resources minimizing significantly the time to re-tune database. This allows DBAs to focus on more "business goal related tasks rather than day-to-day maintenance tasks.

Currently vPostgres will be only available for download as part of  vFabric Data Director. However there is a vPostgres Service available on CloudFoundry.com for Cloud Applications. It is free for use by all applications that support the Cloud Application programming which includes Java, Ruby, node.js  in CloudFoundry.com.


$ vmc services

============== System Services ==============

+------------+---------+-------------------------------+
| Service    | Version | Description                   |
+------------+---------+-------------------------------+
| mongodb    | 1.8     | MongoDB NoSQL store           |
| mysql      | 5.1     | MySQL database service        |
| postgresql | 9.0     | PostgreSQL database service   |
| rabbitmq   | 2.4     | RabbitMQ messaging service    |
| redis      | 2.2     | Redis key-value store service |
+------------+---------+-------------------------------


During a cloud deployment, you could select the "postgresql" service for your application.
More on CloudFoundry services  in a subsequent blog posts.