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© 2013 EDB All rights reserved. 1
Migrations, Health Checks and
Support Experiences - Postgres from
the Service Provider Perspective
Marc Linster | April 2014
© 2013 EDB All rights reserved. 2
• EnterpriseDB Overview (quick)
• Migrations
• Postgres Support Experiences
• Health Checks
Why are we doing this?
− Share some of our metrics with the community
− Learn how to resolve customer problems faster
− Drive our product strategy to make customer problems go away
Agenda
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 3
Postgres Plus
Advanced Server Postgres Plus
Cloud Database
High Availability
PerformanceManagement
REMOTE
DBA 24x7
SUPPORT
PROFESSIONAL
SERVICES
TRAINING
EDB Serves
All Your Postgres Needs
PostgreSQL
Security
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 4
POSTGRES
innovation
ENTERPRISE
reliability
24/7
support
Services
& training
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
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 5
Migrations
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 6
• Majority of interest for migrations from Oracle, followed
by MS SQL, DB2 (few) and MySQL (rare)
• Obstacles
− Missing language equivalents (e.g., autonomous_transaction,
merge)
− Scalability (vertical and RAC-like)
− Need additional constructs in compatibility layer (EDB
proprietary 10th generation)
• Greatly facilitated by Object Relational Frameworks,
such as Hibernate – great indicator for easy migration
to Postgres
• Experience shows that 70%+ of migrations can be
executed quickly and result in comparable
performance
Migrations
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 7
Postgres Support Experiences
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 8
• 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 more complex and more 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
Why Analyze Support Tickets
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 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
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 10
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
Tickets and Platforms
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 11
When do customers call?
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 12
What Do Customers Call About
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
POC Dev Deployment Maintenance
What are customers calling about?
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%
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 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. 14
• 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?
Select Top questions (not in rank order)
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 15
Lessons Learned from the AHC
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 16
• Systematic top-to-bottom review of the customer’s
Postgres production installation
• Identifies issues and improvement opportunities in:
− Security
− Performance
− Backups
− Replication
− Maintenance
− Upgrades
• The following analysis is based on a set of 20 AHCs
executed in 2013
Architectural Health Check
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 17
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
effec
ve_cache_size
shared_buffers
bgw
riter_lru_m
axpages
w
al_buffers
m
aintenance_w
ork_m
em
bgw
riter_lru_m
ul
plier
w
ork_m
em
random
_page_cost
checkpoint_segm
ents
cpu_tuple_cost
checkpoint_com
ple
on_target
checkpoint_
m
eout
log_line_prefix
log_lock_w
aits
log_m
in_dura
on_statem
ent
autovacuum
_vacuum
_scale_factor
checkpoint_w
arning
autovacuum
_vacuum
_cost_delay
autovacuum
_vacuum
_threshold
autovacuum
_nap
m
e
log_autovacuum
_m
in_dura
on
Top Database Parameter Adjustments - Ordered by Frequency
Red bars: experts expected top
parameters, including
vacuum_cost_limit, log_line_prefix, lo
g_min_duration_statement,
log_checkpoints
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 18
Kernel Parameters
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 19
Postgres Platform Distribution
PostgreSQL,
17
Postgres Plus
Advanced
Server, 3
Postgres Plus
Cloud
Database, 1
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 20
Backup and Standby
hot
47%
warm
23%
None
18%
cold
12%
Standby Approach
Physical
Only
36%
Logical
Only
29%
Physical
and
Logical
14%
FS
Snapshot
7%
None
14%
Backup Approach
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
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 21
Maintenance Tasks
Unused
Indexes
39%
Bloated
Indexes
30%
Bloated Tables
13%
Missing
Indexes
9%
Missing
PK
9%
Bloat management continues
to be a problem
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 22
• Windows was less prevalent (10%) than indicated in
support tickets – may be due to a focus on Windows
for development versus production
• Most DBAs do not appear to be familiar enough with
the storage system/SAN
• OS System Adjustments (dirty_background_ratio &
dirty_ratio) are also a major adjustment (70% & 45%)
• Customers would benefit from targeted education
about Postgres-specific parameters and storage
system/SAN guidance
Observations from the AHCs
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 23
• The analysis helped us understand where we need to
collect more data during our support interactions to
better pinpoint problem trends and drive knowledge
base development
• This will drive our product development and feature
prioritization so that we can make customer problems
go away
Summary
© 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 24
• Many EDB Team Members contributed to this analysis
− Thom Brown
− Deepanshu Sharma
− Robert Haas
− Kevin Grittner
− Gabrielle Roth
• Contact
− Marc Linster
marc.linster@enterprisedb.com
+1 (617) 306 6059
Thank you

More Related Content

Migrations, Health Checks, and Support Experiences - Postgres from the Service Provider Perspective

  • 1. © 2013 EDB All rights reserved. 1 Migrations, Health Checks and Support Experiences - Postgres from the Service Provider Perspective Marc Linster | April 2014
  • 2. © 2013 EDB All rights reserved. 2 • EnterpriseDB Overview (quick) • Migrations • Postgres Support Experiences • Health Checks Why are we doing this? − Share some of our metrics with the community − Learn how to resolve customer problems faster − Drive our product strategy to make customer problems go away Agenda
  • 3. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 3 Postgres Plus Advanced Server Postgres Plus Cloud Database High Availability PerformanceManagement REMOTE DBA 24x7 SUPPORT PROFESSIONAL SERVICES TRAINING EDB Serves All Your Postgres Needs PostgreSQL Security
  • 4. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 4 POSTGRES innovation ENTERPRISE reliability 24/7 support Services & training 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
  • 5. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 5 Migrations
  • 6. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 6 • Majority of interest for migrations from Oracle, followed by MS SQL, DB2 (few) and MySQL (rare) • Obstacles − Missing language equivalents (e.g., autonomous_transaction, merge) − Scalability (vertical and RAC-like) − Need additional constructs in compatibility layer (EDB proprietary 10th generation) • Greatly facilitated by Object Relational Frameworks, such as Hibernate – great indicator for easy migration to Postgres • Experience shows that 70%+ of migrations can be executed quickly and result in comparable performance Migrations
  • 7. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 7 Postgres Support Experiences
  • 8. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 8 • 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 more complex and more 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 Why Analyze Support Tickets
  • 9. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 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
  • 10. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 10 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 Tickets and Platforms
  • 11. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 11 When do customers call?
  • 12. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 12 What Do Customers Call About 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% POC Dev Deployment Maintenance What are customers calling about? 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. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 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%
  • 14. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 14 • 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? Select Top questions (not in rank order)
  • 15. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 15 Lessons Learned from the AHC
  • 16. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 16 • Systematic top-to-bottom review of the customer’s Postgres production installation • Identifies issues and improvement opportunities in: − Security − Performance − Backups − Replication − Maintenance − Upgrades • The following analysis is based on a set of 20 AHCs executed in 2013 Architectural Health Check
  • 17. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 17 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% effec ve_cache_size shared_buffers bgw riter_lru_m axpages w al_buffers m aintenance_w ork_m em bgw riter_lru_m ul plier w ork_m em random _page_cost checkpoint_segm ents cpu_tuple_cost checkpoint_com ple on_target checkpoint_ m eout log_line_prefix log_lock_w aits log_m in_dura on_statem ent autovacuum _vacuum _scale_factor checkpoint_w arning autovacuum _vacuum _cost_delay autovacuum _vacuum _threshold autovacuum _nap m e log_autovacuum _m in_dura on Top Database Parameter Adjustments - Ordered by Frequency Red bars: experts expected top parameters, including vacuum_cost_limit, log_line_prefix, lo g_min_duration_statement, log_checkpoints
  • 18. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 18 Kernel Parameters 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
  • 19. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 19 Postgres Platform Distribution PostgreSQL, 17 Postgres Plus Advanced Server, 3 Postgres Plus Cloud Database, 1
  • 20. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 20 Backup and Standby hot 47% warm 23% None 18% cold 12% Standby Approach Physical Only 36% Logical Only 29% Physical and Logical 14% FS Snapshot 7% None 14% Backup Approach 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. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 21 Maintenance Tasks Unused Indexes 39% Bloated Indexes 30% Bloated Tables 13% Missing Indexes 9% Missing PK 9% Bloat management continues to be a problem
  • 22. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 22 • Windows was less prevalent (10%) than indicated in support tickets – may be due to a focus on Windows for development versus production • Most DBAs do not appear to be familiar enough with the storage system/SAN • OS System Adjustments (dirty_background_ratio & dirty_ratio) are also a major adjustment (70% & 45%) • Customers would benefit from targeted education about Postgres-specific parameters and storage system/SAN guidance Observations from the AHCs
  • 23. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 23 • The analysis helped us understand where we need to collect more data during our support interactions to better pinpoint problem trends and drive knowledge base development • This will drive our product development and feature prioritization so that we can make customer problems go away Summary
  • 24. © 2014 EnterpriseDB Corporation. All rights reserved. 24 • Many EDB Team Members contributed to this analysis − Thom Brown − Deepanshu Sharma − Robert Haas − Kevin Grittner − Gabrielle Roth • Contact − Marc Linster marc.linster@enterprisedb.com +1 (617) 306 6059 Thank you

Editor's Notes

  1. This PowerPoint Template includes a series of slide masters with predefined layouts and color schemes for formatting slides Slide Masters are displayed when you right click on a slide and select Layout from menu
  2. Overview of EDB products & ServicesNOTE: THIS SLIDE HAS BUILT-IN “JUMPING” SO YOU CAN CLICK ON ANY ICON TO DRILL DOWN THEN RETURN TO THE OVERVIEW; here’s how:Click on each icon (DBs and services) to drill down to detailsOnce on detail page, click on the icon to move directly to the next icon detail, orClick on the area outside of the drill down detail to return back to the main product & services overviewMain message: EDB is the BEST source for all your Postgres needs:EDB is a database internals product development companyEDB creates add-on features, tools and cloud capabilities designed for enterprise-class workloadsEDB’s deep technical expertise makes it your best source for support and professional servicesSample script:“Just as you’d expect from any enterprise software company, EDB provides various products and services to ensure our customers make the most out of their Postgres deployments. From our standard edition which includes support for the open source PostgreSQL to PPAS and PPCD, we have the right database for your application. We back that up with global follow the sun support, packaged services and training along with RDBA services.Many of customers run PostgreSQL and come to us for support and to take advantage of our add-on functionality, such as PEM and xDB replication server. For lots of workloads this is a fine solution.The majority of our customers do run PPAS, though. The combination of its low cost--$6,900 per year per socket, along with a ton of additional features and functionality above the Standard Edition, it’s a great fit for workloads with lots of concurrent users and lots of transactions.Of course, PPCD gives customers the ability to run either PostgreSQL or PPAS, but in a cloud environment.”
  3. EDB provides enterprises and government agencies with the commercial support and reliability needed to take full advantage of open-source Postgres innovation and cost benefits:24/7 SupportEnterprise-class features & toolsPackaged and professional servicesWide array of classroom and on-demand trainingClear visibility & influence over product road-mapEDB gives you the responsiveness & dependability you need to be successful