PostgreSQL: No More VACUUM, No More Bloat
PostgreSQL, a powerful open-source object-relational database system, has been lauded for its robustness, functionality, and flexibility. However, it is not without its challenges – one of which is the notorious VACUUM process. However, the dawn of a new era is upon us with OrioleDB, a novel engine designed for PostgreSQL that promises to eliminate the need for the resource-consuming VACUUM.
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OrioleDB beta has been released
Long story short, OrioleDB alpha version was released more than year ago. More than 200 bugs were fixed since then. Now, OrioleDB reached beta stage. That means we recommend OrioleDB for pre-production testing. The most interesting workloads for testing could include: high transaction troughput, high volume of updates, high volume of in-memory operations, lock bottlenecks and other extreme cases.
The most notable improvements since alpha release include:
- Support for parallel scan and parallel index build,
- Various fixes for row-level concurrency and triggers,
- Fixes for undo log, system trees and transaction mechanism.
Special thanks to our external contributors:
- Pavel Borisov for implementation of parallel scan and parallel index build,
- Imre Samu for improvements to Docker container.
When Hell Freezes Over?
Postgres is great… until it’s not… In the past few years, there have been a few major public outages of a cloud service, like MailChimp’s Mandril, Joyent’s Manta Storage, and Sentry’s monitoring service. Invariably, the outages affect applications that use Postgres in write-heavy workloads.
As cloud-based services go through a drastic growth spurt, the expectations for their Postgres-centered storage are expected to keep up. Simply scaling up the size of the server that runs Postgres does not fix certain problems that come with growth in traffic.
Fortunately, these outages are far and few, but nonetheless, they leave a huge black eye for the teams affected, unhappiness in their customer base, and embarrassment in the community. Due to many startups practicing radical transparency in their operations, we are able to study the root causes of these outages and identify where improvements can be made.
First, the good news: there is a major improvement coming in the Postgres storage system, via OrioleDB as a new open-source pluggable storage system to the Postgres project. OrioleDB takes a greenfield approach to solve several thorny problems in the Postgres architecture. Some of the benefits have been recently covered here.
But let’s step back and understand how we got here. Postgres was first designed in the 1980’s and presented at SIGMOD ‘86 and ‘87.
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