[GENERAL] UUID vs int keys....

2008-03-03 Thread Nathan Wilhelmi
Hello - Curious if anyone has any experience with the new UUID type in 
8.3? We are currently using sequences for all of our keys and ids. 
However using a UUID instead of a sequence would make some parts of the 
application easier. However we have a few concerns about performance 
issues surrounding the new type. Are they any significant impacts with 
respect to indexing 'random' values over a serial value? The UUID would 
obviously take up a bit more storage than the int based option. Are 
there any particular join gotchas etc with using a UUID? Any other 
gotchas to watch out for?


Thanks!

-Nate


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Re: [GENERAL] Deferred constraints and locks...

2008-02-14 Thread Nathan Wilhelmi

Jan Wieck wrote:


On 2/12/2008 3:04 PM, Tom Lane wrote:


Nathan Wilhelmi [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

Hello - Trying to track down a lock contention problem, I have a 
process that does a series of select / insert operations. At some 
point the process grabs a series of RowExclusiveLock(s) and has the 
obvious effect of stalling other processes. I logged all the 
statements and don't see any for update or explicit lock statements.



Insert statements would naturally take RowExclusiveLock, but that
doesn't block other DML operations.  So the question is what *else*
are you doing?



Those SELECT statements aren't by chance FOR UPDATE, are they?


Jan

Not that I can see, at least from the PG statement logs. So as the 
process runs (it a long running parsing process) it does a number of 
selects/inserts/updates. A pattern I am seeing is that a row is inserted 
and then later updated as more information is known during the parsing 
process. I don't see any explicit lock or for updates statements being 
sent. I can't get a breakpoint low enough in the app yet, but it looks 
like some of the subsequent update statements are pulling 
RowExclusiveLock lock(s), maybe inserts as well. This is where I am a 
bit confused, from Tom's response these are table level locks. From my 
understanding of MVCC, I didn't think this should happen. I would expect 
that other transactions wouldn't see updated values which is what I am 
after, but the problem is that reads are blocking until this long 
transaction completes. What am I missing here I can see this both on 
8.2 and latest 8.3.


Thanks!

-Nate


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Re: [GENERAL] Deferred constraints and locks...

2008-02-12 Thread Nathan Wilhelmi

Tom Lane wrote:


Nathan Wilhelmi [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
 

Hello - Trying to track down a lock contention problem, I have a process 
that does a series of select / insert operations. At some point the 
process grabs a series of RowExclusiveLock(s) and has the obvious effect 
of stalling other processes. I logged all the statements and don't see 
any for update or explicit lock statements.
   



Insert statements would naturally take RowExclusiveLock, but that
doesn't block other DML operations.  So the question is what *else*
are you doing?

regards, tom lane
 


Good question, is there anyway to figure out which rows are locked?

-Nate


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[GENERAL] Deferred constraints and locks...

2008-02-12 Thread Nathan Wilhelmi
Hello - Trying to track down a lock contention problem, I have a process 
that does a series of select / insert operations. At some point the 
process grabs a series of RowExclusiveLock(s) and has the obvious effect 
of stalling other processes. I logged all the statements and don't see 
any for update or explicit lock statements. So I am guesses this is more 
of an internal design issue. All the FKEY constraints are deferrable and 
initially deferred, could this be causing pg to be pulling locks on rows 
that are part of the fkey? Something else I should be looking for?


Thanks!
-Nate


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[GENERAL] Disk configurations....

2008-01-24 Thread Nathan Wilhelmi
Hello - Typically case of a software guy needing to spec hardware for a 
new DB server. Further typified case of not knowing exact amount of data 
and I/O patterns. So if you were to spec a disk system for a new general 
purpose PostgreSQL server any suggestions of what to start with?


Details I have:

1) We think 500GB is enough storage for the DB.
2) I would guess 66% read 33% write patterns, maybe closer to 50/50.

I would assume that we would want to go SCSI raid. Would you do the 
whole disk array as Raid 5 or whole you partition it up differently? 
Would you go with 3x300gb disks or would you use more smaller disks to 
get there?


Any other gotchas or suggestions to look for?

Thanks!

-Nate


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[GENERAL] Specify client encoding for backups...

2007-12-18 Thread Nathan Wilhelmi
Hello - We are using PG_ADMIN backup to create the schema DDL scripts 
for our application. Is there any way to get PGAdmin to not include the 
encoding value or configure PostgreSQL to set the client encoding to 
UNICODE? Having problems with the JDBC driver and the UTF8 encoding when 
we try to execute the scripts as part of our build process.


Thanks!
-Nate


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[GENERAL] Script to reset all sequence values in the a given DB?

2007-12-10 Thread Nathan Wilhelmi
Hello - Does anyone happen to have a SQL script or function that can 
reset all the sequence values found in a given DB? When we rebuild the 
DB it would be handy to be able to set all the sequence back to a known 
starting place.


Thanks!

-Nate


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[GENERAL] Importance of CPU floating point performance...

2007-11-09 Thread Nathan Wilhelmi
Hello - Trying to find out how much floating point operation performance 
effects Postgres in general. Looking at some lower power machines that 
have good integer performance but not great floating point performance, 
shared FPU across cpus. If we store, but don't use in query criteria, 
floating point numbers would Postgres perform the same as machine with 
dedicated FPUs per cpu? Anyone have any suggestions or horror stories to 
share on this topic?


Thanks!

-Nate


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[GENERAL] Configuration starting point...

2007-09-19 Thread Nathan Wilhelmi
Hello - Several people kindly responded directly to me with some 
specific suggestions for this, however the message was mistakenly 
deleted and not in the archives. If you remember who you are and 
wouldn't mind resending that would be fantastic!


Thanks!

-Nate

Hello - Just installed 8.2.4 on a Solaris 9 box. It's an 8-way (15000 
MHz sparc) with 32GB of ram. We don't know the exact table structure yet 
or access patterns, although the first thing that will be looked at is a 
Sesame triple store DB. I would expect that this DB will be more skewed 
to reads than writes. Based on this, are the out of the box configs 
pretty good or are there any recommended changes I should be making to 
start with?


Thanks!

-Nate






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[GENERAL] Configuration starting point...

2007-08-10 Thread Nathan Wilhelmi
Hello - Just installed 8.2.4 on a Solaris 9 box. It's an 8-way (15000 
MHz sparc) with 32GB of ram. We don't know the exact table structure yet 
or access patterns, although the first thing that will be looked at is a 
Sesame triple store DB. I would expect that this DB will be more skewed 
to reads than writes. Based on this, are the out of the box configs 
pretty good or are there any recommended changes I should be making to 
start with?


Thanks!

-Nate


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[GENERAL] Data corruption problem...

2006-12-01 Thread Nathan Wilhelmi
Hello - Ran into an interesting problem last week with data unexpectedly 
being deleted. Has anyone else experienced this and have any suggestions 
on how to prevent this in the future?


Here is the environment:

Server: 8.0.3 on Solaris 9
JDBC Driver: 8.0.311

This is the series of statements that cause the problem, but only under 
a certain condition listed below.


delete from X where id in (select bad_id from Z where name='qwerty');
delete from Y where id in (select bad_id from Z where name='qwerty');
delete from Z where name='qwerty');

The first 2 statements have an error, column bad_id does not exist in 
table Z. If I run this normally from PGAdmin the first 2 silently fail, 
and the last succeeds. In this case tables X and Y are untouched. An 
error for this would be nice but the data is OK, so far so good.


Now we have J2EE (Tomcat hosted) app that access this database via 
connection pool / JDBC driver. The problem scenario is as follows:


1) Start the J2EE app and do some work to access the database, although 
I don't think this matters.
2) Shut down the app server, and as result the connection pool starts to 
shut down.
3) Once the connection pool has started to shut down execute the 
statements listed above from PGAdmin.

4) PGAmin will hang for a second like it's waiting for locks.
5) The statement will return normally, reporting the rows affected from 
the last statement.

6) Tables X and Y are now empty. This is not good.

Now if I fix the first 2 statements the problem doesn't happen, I can 
execute it during shutdown and the data is OK. Obviously I would really 
prefer not to have times where executing a bad SQL statement deletes the 
whole table. Has anyone seen this before, any suggestions how to debug 
this or where to start looking?


Thanks!!!

-Nate










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