When in February I received the email with the news that my talk was accepted at the pgcon it took me some time, and several espresso coffee, to realise that I wasn’t dreaming.
The pgcon email reached me few days after the same talk was accepted at the pycon nove, the Italy’s nationwide Python conference.
The Italian Pycon and the Pgcon are great conferences with amazing speakers and fantastic topics. The sole idea of giving my small contribution it makes me proud and a little scared, because I never talked to an audience composed mostly by fine developers.
Before the release of pg_chameleon 2.0 I had to write an upgrade procedure to allow a smooth migration from the version 1.8.
An interesting challenge I faced was to determine the maximum and minimum position for the MySQL’s binary logs belonging to the same server but stored with different values in multiple sources.
The user defined aggregates, a feature pretty unique to PostgreSQL, allowed me to solve the problem in a robust and simple way.
Back in the days of when I was an Oracle DBA I had to solve a strange behaviour on an Oracle installation. The system for some reasons stopped accepting the writes occasionally and without an apparent reason.
This behaviour appeared odd to anybody except for my team, which addressed the issue immediately. The problem was caused by a not optimal configuration on the Oracle instance.
This thought led me to writing this post.
An ancient italian proverb says
Il backup è quella cosa che andava fatta prima.
A rough translation could be something like this: the backup is the thing that had to be done before.
The concept of backup is quite confusing. Some people wrongly believe that executing a local backup is sufficient to ensure the recover of the data.
In the real world a valid backup is present only if three conditions are true.
pgbackrest is an amazing tool that saves entire PostgreSQL clusters with ease.
In this post we’ll go trough the configuration of the backup using a remote backup server.
For the extensive documentation and detailed instructions please refer to the user guide.
operating system configuration For our example we’ll use two virtual machines on virtualbox with devuan 1.0 Jessie installed.
Each machine is configured in the same way.
1 cpu 1 GB ram Hard disk of 12 GB with single partition ext4 sshd up and running The machines have one bridged network adapter eth0.
