PostgreSQL Usergroup NL meetup

It’s been a long time but we are happy to invite you to the "PostgreSQL UserGroup NL" meetup of 2022 with a great line-up and a perfect venue: Adyen in Amsterdam!

Next to some interesting headliners in this meetup we offer the opportunity to participate in the Lightning Talks. If you have anything to share on the subject of PostgreSQL, please let us know and we are happy to give you the floor.

This Meetup will be held at the office of Adyen, Simon Carmiggeltstraat office close to Central Station. We are going to have some food and drinks. Many thanks to Adyen for their hospitality!!

Let’s meet and shake hands on Nov 15th.

17:30 - 18:30 Arrive, food and drinks

18:30 - 18:35 Opening by Gerard Zuidweg, OptimaData

18:35 - 19:20 Derk van Veen, Adyen

19:20 - 20:00 Frits Hooglander, Yugabyte

20:00 - 20:15 Lightning talks

20:15 - xx:xx Wrap up, networking and refreshments

by Derk van Veen

At Adyen we have invested heavily and built upon the Postgres database engine, generally this has worked  very well for us.

Occasionally Postgres Write Amplification can be a technical challenge at Adyen, fortunately this does not happen often, unfortunately when it does happen it is around critical, high volume workloads.

So we have been working on using Prometheus and Grafana to track and tune issues around Write Amplification, which can normally be relatively easily addressed by tuning FillFactor and/or tweaking application design.

As well as the tooling (Prometheus and Grafana based dashboards), we have developed "awareness training" for our Developer teams, to ensure we proactively tackle any Write Amplification issues.

This presentation starts with the technical background, covering why Postgres Write Amplification can happen, the sorts of workloads which are likely to hit this sort of issue and how we can sometimes mitigate this by tuning FillFactor and/or tweaking application design. Next we talk about monitoring, specifically how to proactively monitor for this, starting with the Postgres standard metrics `pg_stat_user_tables` and then using the Prometheus Postgres exporter and Grafana to track key long term trends.

The aim of the talk is to share best practice and lessons learnt for managing Postgres from Adyen. We want to share this with the broader Postgres community, as we think our DBAs will find this useful and also we're looking for feedback and further possible enhancements.

Finally in terms of coverage, this talk relates to 5 of the topics

• PostgreSQL internals hacking << The 1st half of the presentation dives into Postgres internals
• Tools and utilities << The 2nd half of the presentation is about using open-source monitoring tools (Prometheus and Grafana) to proactively and iteratively monitor and tune Postgres. 
• Tuning and performance improvements << better tuning FillFactor and awareness of how HOT Updates work, has been a major win for us in 2022, we are pushing Postgres to its limits and beyond!
• Administering large scale PostgreSQL installations << tables with billions of UPDATEs per day?
• Case studies and/or success stories of PostgreSQL deployments (or interesting failures) << vacuum was really struggling to keep up, we have massively cut the vacuum costs through tuning FillFactor and/or tweaking application design

By Frits Hoogland

Frits is developer advocate at Yugabyte, where he works on cloud native open source technology and performance challenges. He’s an IT professional who believes in applying a scientific approach to performing IT tasks. He spent 25 years working predominantly with Oracle database technology solving performance issues for some of the world’s largest companies. Frits has also worked for the highly-acclaimed Enkitec corporation, co-wrote a book about Oracle Exadata, and helped the University of Rotterdam build a database for DNA to aid pathological gene selection.

Linux and containers are similar in that they provide operating system resources such as memory and storage. These resources—along with CPU and networking— are key factors to achieve optimal application performance. However, many cloud native applications rely on high performance disk IO to function properly.

In this session, we’ll explore how memory allocation at the container or operating system level influences the performance of buffered disk IO. We’ll also examine Linux memory details and the different ways to perform disk IO. From there, we’ll walk through a number of examples that reveal the dynamics of buffered IOs, with an emphasis on how these change with changes in memory usage, and can lead to spectacular performance differences.

Understanding these dynamics are important to any cloud native application that is dependent on disk IO and has performance requirements.

What are Ligtning Talks?

A lightning talk is a very short presentation lasting only a few minutes. Everybody has the opportunity to take the stage for a few minutes and talk about a particular subject that he/she wants to share or even want some input on from the group. You can reserve your slot for a lightning talk by sending us a mail or write your name down on the day of the Meetup itself.

During a PostgreSQL Meetup we schedule the Lightning Talks to give everybody the oppertunity to get up the stage and share something.

Send us an email if you want to reserve a slot to share some of your experiences, knowlegde, funny or to ask the audience for feedback on a topic. Also you can write down your name on the list at the Meetup itself.

The Meetup will be held at Adyen's beautiful office in Amsterdam. We are very happy and grateful for the hospitality of Adyen to host this Meetup in Adyen's office. 

Adyen is very easy to reach. The office is located in the Oosterdok, right next to Central Station in Amsterdam at Simon Carmiggeltstraat 6-50. By car you drive from the Amsterdam ring road to the office building in barely ten minutes. Parking is available in the Oosterdok parking garage (under the AH) or at the Central Station.

The visiting address is Simon Carmiggeltstraat 6-50, 1011 DJ, Amsterdam

You can signup to attend this meetup in the meetup-group "PostgreSQL Usergroup NL" at www.meetup.com. You don't have an account on Meetup yet? register for free at meetup.com and signup for this meetup!

Link to signup