Why use PostgreSQL?

Why use PostgreSQL?
10 reasons for using PostgreSQL

PGDay Australia 2013
Melbourne, 4 February 2013

Gabriele Bartolini
2ndQuadrant
gabriele.bartolini@2ndQuadrant.it
@_GBartolini_

Gabriele Bartolini
• Co-founder and Manager of 2ndQuadrant Italia

• Data Architect in business critical environments

• Data warehousing

• Member of the PostgreSQL community

• Co-founder of Italian PostgreSQL Users Group

• Co-founder of PostgreSQL Europe

Is it PostgreSQL or Postgres?
It’s both

10 reasons for using Postgres
• Open Source Community • Business Continuity

• License • Security and data protection

• Total Cost of Ownership • PostgreSQL Eco-system

• Development life cycle • Performance and scalability

• Quality of code and • Works the way you do
documentation

Open Source community
• Sense of Community

• Developers, users and advocates

• Volunteers and professionals

• Hundreds of members from all over the world

• sensitive to i18n and l10n issues!

PostgreSQL Database Management System
(formerly known as Postgres, then as Postgres95)

Portions Copyright (c) 1996-2012, PostgreSQL Global Development Group

Portions Copyright (c) 1994, The Regents of the University of California

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
documentation for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement
is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this
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License
• Applies to every part (module, product, option) of Postgres

• server, client, libraries, additional modules

• 100% open source

• Highly Permissive

• Not subject to monopoly nor acquisitions

• No need to hire a lawyer to understand it

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Prospect of costs of a database solution
over a period of 3 years for 1 server
License Support
300.000
270.000
240.000

210.000 64.000

180.000

Cost in Euro
150.000
140.000
120.000
32.000
90.000
70.000
60.000
16.000
30.000 35.000

0 7.500
1 CPU Socket 2 CPU Socket 4 CPU Socket PostgreSQL*

* PostgreSQL with 24/7 production support from 2ndQuadrant

Total cost of ownership
• Direct and indirect costs of a database solution:

• total costs of acquisition

• including license fees, migration costs, training costs, ...

• operating costs

• including ICT personnel, support, testing, business
continuity, ...

• in the long term, do not forget upgrades!

Major releases from 1995
Postgres 95 1.0 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4
6.5 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.0
8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 9.0 9.1 9.2
21

18

15

12

9

6

3

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

Development life cycle
• 21 releases from 1995 • Last pattern: release
happens in 3rd quarter
• 5 releases in the last 5 years
• Stakeholders: sponsors,
• 4 milestones, called professionals, researchers
“commit fests”
• Mailing list: pgsql-
• 1+ alpha release, 1+ beta hackers@postgresql.org
release, release candidate
• PostgreSQL releases are
• Spread over ~1 year of maintained by the
activities community for 5 years

#5
Quality of code and documentation

Quality
• Code: • Documentation:

• written in C (multi-platform) • part of the code

• solid foundations • PostgreSQL PDF manual:

• collaborative development • > 2500 pages

• 0 known bugs releases

• regression tests, buildfarm
and continuous integration

Downtime

... € $ £ € $ £ € ...
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12
13 14 15
16 17 18
19 20 21
22 23

Unintentional human error
postgres@pg $> psql
psql (9.2.2)
Type "help" for help.

postgres=# UPDATE t SET colour = ‘red’;
UPDATE 4815162342
postgres=# ^C
^C
^C
^Z

Business continuity
• Disaster recovery (data loss) • Recovery Point Objective

• High Availability (down time) • RPO = 0 with SyncRep

• RPO ~0 with StreamRep

• Reliability and data integrity • tunable with log shipping

• Integration with common • Recovery Time Objective
monitoring tools
• 99.99% uptime a year is
common (1hr downtime)

Simple business continuity stack
App

repmgr
Master Standby

server A Barman server B

DR

server C

#7
Security and data protection

Security and data protection
• Full disclosure: • Integration with Enterprise
www.postgresql.org/ security infrastructures (e.g.
support/security/ LDAP or GSSAPI)

• Secure TCP/IP Connections • Group and user permissions
using SSL
• Multi-layer security model
• including support for
certiﬁcates • from server to column level

• Cryptographic functions • Security-Enhanced Linux
(pgcrypto extension) (SELinux)

Login First Last Email DOB PWD
Users table
name name

Read/Write role (Insert/Update/Delete/Select)

First Login
Last Email
PWD DOB
Users table
name name

Authenticator role (Select on two columns)

PostgreSQL Eco-System
• PostgreSQL community

• Organisations using PostgreSQL (stakeholders):

• HP, Nasa, CME, Instagram, Skype, VMWare, NTT, Heroku, ...

• PostgreSQL sponsors and professionals:

• offering world-wide 24/7 support services (SLA)

• You are not alone, even in business critical environments

External tools and libraries
• Satellite projects: • Third party tools:

• GIS: PostGIS, pgrouting • open source

• Admin: pgAdmin • commercial

• Continuity & Scalability: PL/ • include frameworks,
Proxy, pgPool, pgBouncer, products, libraries, ...
Skytools, repmgr, Barman,
pgmemcache ... • at any stage of data
management: operations,
• ... ETL, analysis

#9
Performance and scalability

Performance and scalability
• Big Data, Fast Data • Hot Standby

• Linear scalability (64 core) • Data/query distribution, aka
Sharding (e.g. PL/Proxy)
• I/O access
• Memcache
• Indexes
• PgQ
• Partitioning

• Tablespaces

Hot Standby
PostgreSQL 9.2

M App

backup S BI App

S S S

Data Centre 1 Data Centre 2

Works the way you do
• Invest in your personnel’s • Several procedural
knowledge languages

• Standard compliant (e.g. • Versatile and extensible
SQL, XML, UTF8, ...)
• custom data types
• Client interfaces: C/C++,
JDBC, ODBC, .Net, Python, • intelligence in the database
Perl, Ruby, PHP, ...
• extensions (from 9.1)
• Vast gamma of ORMs
• Database Unit testing

PostgreSQL 9.2 Webapp
HTML 5
Apps Javascript
CSS 3

JSON

Postgres

NoSQL with Postgres 9.2
HTML 5
Apps Javascript
CSS 3
“NoSQL”

PL/Proxy

... Postgres Postgres Postgres Postgres ...

Foreign data wrappers
...
CREATE FOREIGN TABLE oracle_table (
id integer NOT NULL,
...
) SERVER oradb OPTIONS
(schema 'ORAUSER', table 'ORATAB');
...
-- push down of the WHERE clause
SELECT * FROM oracle_table WHERE id=10;

Recap
• Open Source Community • Business Continuity

• License • Security and data protection

• Total Cost of Ownership • PostgreSQL Eco-system

• Development life cycle • Performance and scalability

• Quality of code and • Works the way you do
documentation

Conclusions
• 100% open source, no license fees, no legal complications

• High standard quality, security and reliability

• Established yet versatile and dynamic project

• Successfully operating in many business/mission critical
environments around the globe

• Knowledge transfer (e.g. Oracle, Greenplum)

Is PostgreSQL missing a feature?
Think about developing it yourself or sponsor the
development.
It might be cost effective in the medium term!

PostgreSQL Australia
This is the ﬁrst meeting of our community in Australia.
You can all be part of this community!

Questions
E-mail: gabriele.bartolini@2ndQuadrant.it
Twitter: @_GBartolini_
Website: www.2ndQuadrant.com

Thank you!
Copyright (c) 2013 2ndQuadrant Italia
License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/it/deed.en

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