Friday 8 March 2013

Postgres Plus 9.0 Advanced Server Database Administration

Recently I got into a tiff over the lack of CHECK CONSTRAINTS in MySql. The MySQL manual[1] says:
“The CHECK clause is parsed but ignored by all storage engines.”
They say it's best to use a Trigger to work around the problem. Luckily, I have the opportunity for my work to attend a course in Postgres Plus Advanced Server Database Administration.

Included in the course was a certification track. So, since the fourth of March 2013, I can now officially call myself an "EnterpriseDB Certified Postgres Plus 9.0 Associate". Yay!!!

I've made some notes during the course, and this here are some excerpts from them I feel were important enough to share.

Introduction

EnterpriseDB [3] provides a version of PostgreSQL, called Postgres Plus Advanced Server[2], that is very similar to Oracle Database Server in a lot of ways.

The EnterpriseDB version requires a license, but you can download the trialversion to use for free for a couple of months. Downloading it is only possible after registering on their website.

In fact, the PostgreSQL Server will attempt to contact your profile info via the internet upon startup, but if there is no internet connection it starts up regardless.

Support for

Postgres Plus 9.0 has support for the following features:
SQL
PostgreSQL supports most of the major features of de SQL:2011 standard (ISO/IEC 9075:2011 "Database Language SQL").[5]
schemas
there is a schema search path per database/per user, by default set to ['$user',public], that indicates in what preference schemas are checked when a tablename is not prefixed with the schema
savepoints
make it possible within a transaction to "save" part of the transaction, so the entire transaction need not be rollbacked upon failure, but can be rollbacked to the savepoint.
write ahead logging
log first, *then* the database
vertical table partitioning
divides different columns of one table across tables. Oracle syntax works, but can allow many more partitions
horizontal table partitioning
also called database sharding. Different rows of a table are stored in different tables. It's kind of a view of a couple of tables unioned together.
tablespaces
tables on different devices for concurrent io.
caching
caching of everything in memory
materialized views
a view that is actually stored as a table, which provides the advantage of having indexes and being quicker, and the disadvantage of being possibly out of date
synonyms
created aliases for database objects (tables, procedures, etc)
hierarchical queries
returns a resultset which is a flattened tree, based on a parent-child relationship defined in a CONNECT BY. It is possible to create queries that work on the node-level by using LEVEL (for example for indentation). ORDER SIBLINGS makes it possible to order all siblings under a common parent as you'd like.
database links
database links provide links in the current database to tables in other (remote) databases that otherwise could not be queried.
optimizer hints
hints provided to update/insert/delete/select statements for influencing which query plan the optimizer will choose. The APPEND keyword for this is interesting. It forces an insert to be appended at the end of the table, not at the location of a (couple of) vacuumed record(s). This is handy for efficient bulkloading of data.
MSRs
send multiple requests of the database all at once, instead of each request individually. Minimizes network round trips.
functions
lets you embed functions that perform actions within a regular SELECT query. A common use is with "SELECT pg_reload_conf();" which reloads the configuration.
inheritance
define tables as inherited from other tables

Glossary

DBMS
DataBase Management System
fsm
free space map
hba
Host Based Access
MSR
Multi-Statement Request
MVCC
Multi Version Concurrency Control
OLAP
Online analytical processing
OLTP
Online transaction processing
QUEL [4]
old standard query language existing alongside SQL
RDBMS
Relational DBMS
STONITH
"Shoot The Other Node In The Head", just to make sure that the master, which went down, stays down after the slave takes over.
tid
tuple id, identification of a row in the table (a row in a table is called a tuple in Postgres)
vm
visibility map
WAL
Write Ahead Logging
xlog
transaction log

References

[1] MySQL manual 5.6 - CREATE TABLE
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/create-table.html
[2] PostgreSQL
http://www.postgresql.org/
[3] EnterpriseDB/
http://www.enterprisedb.com/
[4] QUEL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages
[5] Appendix D. SQL Conformance
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/features.html

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