In November 2005, PostgreSQL 8.1 was released. It included a number of internal architectural changes, some of which aimed to improve how fast the database would run on a multiprocessor system with many active clients. The result was a major improvement in the ability of the database to scale upwards to handle a heavy load. Benchmarks on modern hardware really highlight just how far that version leapfrogged earlier ones. You can find an excellent performance comparison of versions 8.0 through 8.4 from György Vilmos at http://suckit.blog.hu/2009/09/29/postgresql_history. This shows exactly how dramatic these improvements have been.

This test gives a transactions per second (TPS) figure that measures the total system speed, and you can run it in either a read-only mode or one that includes writes. The read-only performance improved by over four times from 8.0 to 8.1 and more than doubled again by 8.3:

The rise in the number of clients at the peak load gives us an idea of how well the database internals handle access to shared resources. The area 8.1 in particular included a significant upgrade. Performance improved similarly on the write side, with almost an 8 times gain between 8.0 and 8.3:

The small decrease in performance from 8.3 to 8.4 in both these tests is due to some subtle retuning of the database to improve its worst-case performance. More statistics are collected in 8.4 to improve complicated queries, at the expense of slightly slowing the sort of trivial ones tested here.

These improvements have been confirmed by other benchmarking results, albeit normally not covering such a wide range of versions. It's easy to see that any conclusion about PostgreSQL performance reached before late 2005, when 8.1 shipped, is completely out of date at this point. The speed improvement in 2008's 8.3 release was an additional large leap. Versions before 8.3 are not representative of the current performance and there are other reasons to prefer using that one or a later one too.

Because of these dramatic gains, if you have an older PostgreSQL system you'd like to make faster, the very first thing you should ask yourself is not how to tweak its settings, but instead if it's possible to upgrade to a newer version. If you're starting a new project, 8.3 is the earliest version you should consider. In addition to the performance improvements, there were some changes to that version that impact application coding that you'd be better off to start with to avoid needing to retrofit later.

Chapter 16, Avoiding Common Problems, includes a reference guide to what performance-related features were added to each major version of PostgreSQL from 8.1 through 10.0. You might discover that one of the features only available in a very recent version is compelling to you, and therefore you have a strong preference to use that one. Many of these version-specific changes are also highlighted throughout the book.

Until very recently, the only way to upgrade an existing PostgreSQL version to a newer major version, such as going from 8.1.X to 8.2.X, was to dump and reload. The and/or programs are used to write the entire content of the database to a file, using the newer versions of those programs. That way, if any changes need to be made to upgrade, the newer dumping program can try to handle them. Not all upgrade changes will happen automatically though. Then, depending on the format you dumped in, you can either restore that just by running the script it generates or use the program to handle that task. pg_restore can be a much better alternative in newer PostgreSQL versions that include a version with parallel restore capabilities.

Dumping can take a while, and restoring can take even longer. While this is going on, your database likely needs to be down, so that you don't allow any changes that won't then be migrated over by the dump. For large databases, this downtime can be both large and unacceptable.

The most demanding sites prefer near-zero downtime, to run 24/7. There, a dump and reload is never an acceptable option. Until recently, the only real approach available for doing PostgreSQL upgrades in those environments has been using statement replication to do so. Slony is the most popular tool for that, and more information about it is available in Chapter 14, Scaling with Replication. One of Slony's features is that you don't have to be running the same version of PostgreSQL on all the nodes you are replicating to. You can bring up a new node running a newer PostgreSQL version, wait for replication to complete, and then switch over once it matches the original.

Another tool used for the asynchronous primary/secondary replication is Londiste from SkyTools. One of the benefits of Londiste over the streaming replication that’s in the core of PostgreSQL is that Londiste can replicate a single database or a table from a database. Streaming replication will create an exact copy of the database server. Londiste provides more granularity for replication which makes it ideal for our migration. It allows us to move databases from several servers to one unified server.

Now, there is another way available that works without needing any replication software. A program originally called pg_migrator is capable of upgrading from 8.3 to 8.4 without the dump and reload. This process is called in-place upgrading. You need to test this carefully, and there are both known limitations and likely still unknown ones related to less popular PostgreSQL features. Be sure to read the documentation of the upgrade tool very carefully. Starting in PostgreSQL 10.0, this module is included with the core database, with the name changed to pg_upgrade. pg_upgrade is a native PostgreSQL command and must be offline. While all in-place upgrades have some risk and need careful testing, in many cases, these will take you from 8.3 or 8.4 to 10.0 and hopefully beyond.

The PostgreSQL development community is now moving to an online replication approach, for example the pg_logical extension for PostgreSQL providing much faster replication than Slony, Bucardo or Londiste, as well as cross-version upgrades

The major internal changes to 8.3 make it impossible to upgrade from any earlier version past it without dumping the entire database and reloading it into the later one. This makes 8.3 a doubly important version milestone to cross. Not only is it much faster than 8.2, once your data is in 8.3, you can perform in-place upgrades from there.

Going from an earlier version to PostgreSQL 8.3 or later can be a difficult change. Some older applications rely on non-character data types being transparently cast to the type, a behavior removed from 8.3 for a variety of reasons. For details, see http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/release-8-3.html.

While there's always a chance that upgrading your database version can introduce new issues, it is particularly likely that applications written against an earlier version will need to be updated to work against 8.3 or later. It is possible to work around this issue by manually adding back the automatic typecasting features that were removed. However, fixing the behavior in your application instead is a more robust and sustainable solution to the problem. The old behavior was eliminated because it caused subtle application issues. If you just add it back, you'll both be exposed to those and need to continue doing this extra cost additional step with every new PostgreSQL release. There is more information available at https://www.endpoint.com/blog/2010/01 on this topic and on the general challenges of doing a major PostgreSQL upgrade.

A dump/reload, or the use of tools such as pg_upgrade, is not needed for minor version updates, for example, going from 8.4.1 to 8.4.2. These simply require stopping the server, installing the new version, and then running the newer database binary against the existing server data files. Some people avoid ever doing such upgrades once their application is running for fear that a change in the database will cause a problem. This should never be the case for PostgreSQL.

You should never find an unexpected change that breaks an application in a minor PostgreSQL upgrade. Bug, security, and corruption fixes are always done in a way that minimizes the odds of introducing an externally visible behavior change, and if that's not possible, the reason why and the suggested workarounds will be detailed in the release notes. What you will find is that some subtle problems, resulting from resolved bugs, can clear up even after a minor version update. It's not uncommon to discover that the reporting of a problem to one of the PostgreSQL mailing lists is resolved in the latest minor version update compatible with that installation, and upgrading to that version is all that's needed to make the issue go away.

Starting from version 9, it is possible to migrate a complete cluster (users and databases) using pg_upgrade. It is useful to migrate from a minor version to a major version, for example from PostgreSQl 9.6 to PostgreSQL 10. This way to work is safe and faster than dump/restore, because pg_upgrade migrates PostgreSQL pages in a binary way and it's not necessary rebuild any indexes.

As mentioned above, another approach may be to use pglogical, pglogical is a logical replication system implemented entirely as a PostgreSQL extension. Fully integrated, it requires no triggers or external programs. This alternative to physical replication is a highly efficient method of replicating data using a publish/subscribe model for selective replication. Using pglogical we can migrate and upgrade PostgreSQL with almost zero downtime

There are certainly situations where other database solutions will perform better. For example, PostgreSQL is missing features needed to perform well on some of the more difficult queries in the TPC-H test suite (see Chapter 8, Database Benchmarking, for more details). It's correspondingly less suitable for running large data warehouse applications than many of the commercial databases. If you need queries along the lines of some of the very heavy ones TPC-H includes, you may find that databases such as Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server still have a performance advantage worth paying for. There are also several PostgreSQL-derived databases that include features making them more appropriate for data warehouses and similar larger systems. Examples include Greenplum, Aster Data, and Netezza.

For some types of web applications, you can only get acceptable performance by cutting corners on the data integrity features in ways that PostgreSQL just won't allow. These applications might be better served by a less strict database, such as MySQL or even a really minimal one, such as SQLite. Unlike the fairly mature data warehouse market, the design of this type of application is still moving around quite a bit. Work on approaches using the key/value-based NoSQL approach, including CouchDB, MongoDB, and Cassandra, are all becoming more popular at the time of writing this. All of them can easily outperform a traditional database, provided you have no need to run the sort of advanced queries that key/value stores are slower at handling. PostgreSQL also natively supports and indexes the Json data type for a NoSQL data approach.

Starting from version 9.4, PostgreSQL has the jsonb field and it can be used as a NoSQL system. jsonb fields are indexable fields, and starting from version 10.x, new operators and functions are present in PostgreSQL that allow deleting, modifying, or inserting values into jsonb values, including at specific path locations.

Starting from version 9.3, PostgreSQL has foreign data wrapper (fdw) support. With fdw, PostgreSQL can connect to many external database management system (DBMS), and it can see foreign tables (for example, MySQL or Oracle tables) as local tables. Some of the best know fdws are:

• Oracle
• MySQL
• Informix
• Firebird
• SQLite
• CSV files
• Sybase
• Microsoft SQL Server
• MongoDB
• Cassandra

The complete list is available at https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Foreign_data_wrappers.

If you're used to your database vendor supplying a full tool chain with the database itself, from server management to application development, PostgreSQL may be a shock to you. Like many successful open source projects, PostgreSQL tries to stay focused on the features it's uniquely good at. This is what the development community refers to as the PostgreSQL core: the main database server, and associated utilities, that can only be developed as a part of the database itself. When new features are proposed, if it's possible for them to be built and distributed out of core, this is the preferred way to do things. This approach keeps the database core as streamlined as possible, as well as allowing those external projects to release their own updates without needing to synchronize them against the main database's release schedule.

Successful PostgreSQL deployments should recognize that a number of additional tools, each with their own specialized purpose, will need to be integrated with the database core server to build a complete system.

One part of the PostgreSQL core that you may not necessarily have installed is what's called the contrib modules (it is named after the directory they are stored in). These are optional utilities shipped with the standard package, but that aren't necessarily installed by default on your system. The contrib code is maintained and distributed as part of the PostgreSQL core, but not required for the server to operate.

From a code quality perspective, the contrib modules aren't held to quite as high a standard, primarily by how they're tested. The main server includes heavy regression tests for every feature, run across a large build farm of systems that look for errors and look for greater performance and greater stability. The optional contrib modules don't get that same level of testing coverage. However, the code itself is maintained by the same development team, and some of the modules are extremely popular and well tested by users.

A list of all the contrib modules available can be found at at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/contrib.html.

One good way to check whether you have contrib modules installed is to see if the program is available. That's one of the few contrib components that installs a full program, rather than just the scripts you can use. Here's a Unix example of checking for pgbench :

$ pgbench -V
pgbench (PostgreSQL) 10.0  

If you're using an RPM or DEB packaged version of PostgreSQL, as the case would be on many Linux systems, the optional package contains all of the contrib modules and their associated installer scripts. You may have to add that package using yum, apt-get, or a similar mechanism if it wasn't installed already. On Solaris, the package is named SUNWpostgr-contrib .

If you're not sure where your system's PostgreSQL contrib modules are installed, you can use a filesystem utility to search. locate works well for this purpose on many Unix-like systems, as does the find command. The file search utilities available on the Windows Start menu will work. A sample file you could look for is pg_buffercache.sql, which will be used in the upcoming chapter Chapter 5, Memory for Database Caching, on memory allocation. Here's where that might be on some of the platforms that PostgreSQL supports:

• RHEL and CentOS Linux systems will put the main file you need into /usr/share/pgsql/contrib/pg_buffercache.sql
  
• Debian or Ubuntu Linux systems will install the file at /usr/share/postgresql/version/contrib/pg_buffercache.sql
  
• Solaris installs it into /usr/share/pgsql/contrib/pg_buffercache.sql
  
• The standard Windows one-click installer with the default options will always include the contrib modules, and this one will be in C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL/version/share/contrib/pg_buffercache.sql
  

Building your own PostgreSQL from source code can be a straightforward exercise on some platforms if you have the appropriate requirements already installed on the server. Details are documented at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/install-procedure.html.

After building the main server code, you'll also need to compile contrib modules by yourself too. Here's an example of how that would work, presuming that your PostgreSQL destination is /usr/local/postgresql, and that there's a directory there named source you put the source code into (this is not intended to be a typical or recommended structure you should use):

$ cd /usr/local/postgresql/source
$ cd contrib/pg_buffercache/
$ make
$ make install
/bin/mkdir -p '/usr/local/postgresql/lib/postgresql'
/bin/mkdir -p '/usr/local/postgresql/share/postgresql/contrib'
/bin/sh ../../config/install-sh -c -m 755 pg_buffercache.so '/usr/local/postgresql/lib/postgresql/pg_buffercache.so'
/bin/sh ../../config/install-sh -c -m 644 ./uninstall_pg_buffercache.sql '/usr/local/postgresql/share/postgresql/contrib'
/bin/sh ../../config/install-sh -c -m 644 pg_buffercache.sql '/usr/local/postgresql/share/postgresql/contrib'
  

It's also possible to build and install all the contrib modules at once by running / from the directory.

While some contrib programs such as pgbench, are directly executable, most are utilities that you install into a database in order to add extra features to them.

As an example, to install the module into a database named abc, the following command line would work (assuming the RedHat location of the file):

$ psql -d abc -f /usr/share/postgresql/contrib/pg_buffercache.sql   

You could instead use the pgAdmin III GUI management utility, which is bundled with the Windows installer for PostgreSQL, instead of the command line:

1. Navigate to the database you want to install the module into.
2. Click on the SQL icon in the toolbar to bring up the command editor.
3. Choose File/Open. Navigate to C:\Program
   Files\PostgreSQL/version/share/contrib/pg_buffercache.sql and open that file.
4. Execute using either the green arrow or Query/Execute.

You can do a quick test of the module installed on any type of system by running the following quick query:

SELECT * FROM pg_buffercache;  

If any results come back, the module was installed. Note that pg_buffercache will only be installable and usable by database superusers.

The official home of many PostgreSQL-related projects is pgFoundry.

pgFoundry only hosts software for PostgreSQL, and it provides resources such as mailing lists and bug tracking, in addition to file distribution. Many of the most popular PostgreSQL add-on programs are hosted there:

• Windows software allowing access to PostgreSQL through .NET and OLE
• Connection poolers, such as pgpool and pgBouncer
• Database management utilities, such as pgFouine, SkyTools, and PgTune

While sometimes maintained by the same people who work on the PostgreSQL core, pgFoundry code varies significantly in quality. One way to help spot the healthier projects is to note how regularly and recently new versions have been released.

Another site where it is possible to find many PostgreSQL-related projects is PGXN. PGXN is more recent than pgFoundry and it is possible to find recent extensions there.

The PostgreSQL Extension Network (PGXN) is a central distribution system for open source PostgreSQL extension libraries. It consists of four basic parts:

• PGXN Manager: An upload and distribution infrastructure for extension developers
• PGXN API: A centralized index and API of distribution metadata
• PGXN Search: This site is for searching extensions and perusing their documentation
• PGXN Client: A command-line client for downloading, testing, and installing extensions

The difference between pgFoundry and PGXN is that pgFoundry is about project management and PGXN is about distribution and exposure.

Beyond what comes with the PostgreSQL core, the contrib modules, and software available on pgFoundry, there are plenty of other programs that will make PostgreSQL easier and more powerful. These are available from sources all over the internet. There are actually so many available that choosing the right package for a requirement can itself be overwhelming.

Some of the best programs will be highlighted throughout the book, to help provide a short list of the ones you should consider early. This approach, where you get a basic system running and then add additional components as needed, is the standard way large open source projects are built.

It can be difficult for some corporate cultures to adapt to that style, such as ones where any software installation requires everything from approval to a QA cycle. In order to improve the odds of your PostgreSQL installation being successful in such environments, it's important to start introducing this concept early on. Additional programs to add components building on the intentionally slim database core will be needed later, and not all of what's needed will be obvious at the beginning.

While every application has unique growth aspects, there are many common techniques that you'll find necessary as an application using a PostgreSQL database becomes used more heavily. The chapters of this book each focus on one of the common aspects of this process. The general path that database servers follow includes the following steps:

1. Select hardware to run the server on. Ideally, you'll test that hardware to make sure it performs as expected too.
2. Set up all the parts of database disk layout: RAID level, filesystem, and possibly table/index layout on disk.
3. Optimize the server configuration.
4. Monitor server performance and how well queries are executing.
5. Improve queries to execute more efficiently, or add indexes to help accelerate them.
6. As it gets more difficult to just tune the server to do more work, instead reduce the amount it has to worry about by introducing connection pooling and caching.
7. Partition larger tables into sections. Eventually, really large ones may need to be split so that they're written to multiple servers simultaneously.

This process is by no means linear. You can expect to make multiple passes over optimizing the server parameters. It may be the case that you decide to buy newer hardware first, rather than launching into replication or partitioning work that requires application redesign work. Some designs might integrate caching into the design from the very beginning. The important thing is to be aware of the various options available and to collect enough data about what limits the system is reaching to decide which of the potential changes is most likely to help.

Work on improving database performance has its own terminology, just like any other field. Here are some terms or phrases that will be used throughout the book; both of these terms will be used to refer to the current limitation that is preventing performance from getting better:

• Running a test to determine how fast a particular operation can run. This is often done to figure out where the bottleneck of a program or system is.
• Monitoring what parts of a program are using the most resources when running a difficult operation, such as a benchmark. This is typically to help prove where the bottleneck is, and whether it's been removed as expected after a change. Profiling a database application usually starts with monitoring tools, such as vmstat and iostat. Popular profiling tools at the code level include gprof, OProfile, and DTrace.

One of the interesting principles of performance tuning work is that, in general, you cannot figure out what bottleneck an application will next run into until you remove the current one. When presented with a system that's not as fast as someone would expect it to be, you'll often see people guessing what the current bottleneck is, or what the next one will be. That's generally a waste of time. You're always better off measuring performance, profiling the parts of the system that are slow, and using that to guess at causes and guide changes.

Let's say what you've looked at suggests that you should significantly increase shared_buffers, the primary tunable for memory used to cache database reads and writes. This normally has some positive impact, but there are potential negative things you could encounter instead. The information needed to figure out which category a new application will fall into, whether this change will increase or decrease performance, cannot be predicted from watching the server running with the smaller setting. This falls into the category of chaos theory: even a tiny change in the starting conditions can end up rippling out to a very different end condition, as the server makes millions of decisions and they can be impacted to a small degree by that change. Similarly, if is set too small, there are several other parameters that won't work as expected at all, such as those governing database checkpoints.

Since you can't predict what's going to happen most of the time, the mindset you need to adopt is one of heavy monitoring and change control.

Introduce a small targeted change. Try to quantify what's different and be aware that some changes you have rejected as not positive won't always stay that way forever. Move the bottleneck to somewhere else, and you may discover that some parameter that didn't matter before is now suddenly the next limiting factor.

There's a popular expression on the mailing list devoted to PostgreSQL performance when people speculate about root causes without doing profiling to prove their theories: less talk, more gprof. While gprof may not be the tool of choice for every performance issue, given it's more of a code profiling tool than a general monitoring one, the idea that you measure as much as possible before speculating as to the root causes is always a sound one. You should also measure again to verify that your change did what you expected too.

Another principle that you'll find is a recurring theme in this book is that you must be systematic about investigating performance issues. Do not assume your server is fast because you bought it from a reputable vendor; benchmark the individual components yourself. Don't start your database performance testing with application level tests; run synthetic database performance tests that you can compare against other people's first. That way, when you run into the inevitable application slowdown, you'll already know your hardware is operating as expected and that the database itself is running well. Once your system goes into production, some of the basic things you might need to do in order to find a performance problem, such as testing hardware speed, become impossible to take the system down.

You'll be in much better shape if every server you deploy is tested with a common methodology, which is exactly what later chapters here lead you through. Just because you're not a hardware guy, it doesn't mean you should skip over the parts here that cover things such as testing your disk performance. You need to perform work like that as often as possible when exposed to new systems—that's the only way to get a basic feel of whether something is operated within the standard range of behavior or if instead there's something wrong.

PostgreSQL has come a long way in the last five years. After building solid database fundamentals, the many developers adding features across the globe have made significant strides in adding both new features and performance improvements in recent releases. The features added to the latest PostgreSQL, 10.0, making replication and read scaling easier than ever before, are expected to further accelerate the types of applications the database is appropriate for.

The extensive performance improvements in PostgreSQL 9.x and 10.x in particular shatter some earlier notions that the database server was slower than its main competitors.

There are still some situations where PostgreSQL's feature set results in slower query processing than some of the commercial databases it might otherwise displace.

If you're starting a new project using PostgreSQL, use the latest version possible (your preference really should be to deploy version 8.3 or later).

PostgreSQL works well in many common database applications, but certainly there are applications it's not the best choice for.

Not everything you need to manage and optimize a PostgreSQL server will be included in a basic install. Be prepared to include an additional number of utilities that add features outside of what the core database aims to provide.

Performance tuning is best approached as a systematic, carefully measured practice.

In the following chapter, we will discuss the hardware best-suited for the
PostgreSQL server.