Waiting for 9.1 – pg_basebackup

On 23rd of January, Magnus Hagander committed patch which adds:

Add pg_basebackup tool for streaming base backups
 
This tool makes it possible to do the pg_start_backup/
copy files/pg_stop_backup step in a single command.
 
There are still some steps to be done before this is a
complete backup solution, such as the ability to stream
the required WAL logs, but it's still usable, and
could do with some buildfarm coverage.
 
In passing, make the checkpoint request optionally
fast instead of hardcoding it.
 
Magnus Hagander, reviewed by Fujii Masao and Dimitri Fontaine

Continue reading Waiting for 9.1 – pg_basebackup

How to remove backups?

Question from title sounds weird to you? It's just a ‘rm backup_filename'? Well. I really wish it was so simple in some cases.

One of the servers I'm looking into, there is interesting situation:

  • quite busy database server (2k tps is the low point of the day)
  • very beefy hardware
  • daily backups, each sized at about 100GB
  • backups stored on ext3 filesystem with default options
  • before launching daily backup, script removes oldest backup (we keep 3 days of backups on this machine)

Continue reading How to remove backups?

Waiting for 8.4 – parallel restoration of dumps

On 2nd of February Andrew Dunstan committed his patch (with editing by Tom Lane) that:

Log Message:
-----------
Provide for parallel restoration from a custom format archive. Each data and
post-data step is run in a separate worker child (a thread on Windows, a child
process elsewhere) up to the concurrent number specified by the new pg_restore
command-line --multi-thread | -m switch.

Continue reading Waiting for 8.4 – parallel restoration of dumps