PGCon2015 - final

PGCon 2015
The PostgreSQL Conference

Speakers
Tetsuo Sakata
Yurie Enomoto
Schedule
Day Talks - Day 4 - Friday - 2015-06-19
Room DMS 1160
Start time 15:00
Duration 00:45
Info
ID 825
Track Case Studies
Language used for presentation English

Improving PostgreSQL for Greater Enterprise Adoption

PostgreSQL Enterprise Consortium (PGECons for short) is an organization that consists of major IT companies in Japan, aiming to promote PostgreSQL to enterprise users in the country.

Since 2012 when PGECons was established, we have been doing surveys of PostgreSQL's functions and performance to PGECons members to estimate how PostgreSQL well meets their requirements. In this talk, we will focus on some of major requests from the surveys, including enhancement of table partitioning and error messages handling. From the enterprise users' point of view, we would like to share these obstacles behind the requests that might limit PostgreSQL's acceptance, in order to cope with these issues with the community.

[Partitioning] More the size of a database grows, the more difficult the design and operation of the system become. For example, a sales accounting application has such difficulty, which is often solved by using horizontal table partitioning.

We have surveyed how PostgreSQL can be applied to such kind of applications to the member of PGECons, and evaluated performance of table partitioning. These surveys result suggested PostgreSQL partitioning issues below.

  • larger number of partitions slows query response time
  • definition and usage of partitioned table are intricate

From additional surveys about proprietary DBMS usage to the members, we will show what are needed in partitioning and the features of the application areas that are important but difficult to be supported by PostgreSQL. Then, we will point out that enhancing partitioning functions will make PostgreSQL to be spread to the aforementioned areas.

[Error messages] When shooting a trouble about PostgreSQL, a user analyzes a trouble to identify the cause based on the error logs and error messages. However, when we analyze a trouble with only SQLSTATE code we sometimes cannot identify the exact cause because an error code is often assigned to multiple different error messages. Also, we have similar difficulty when analyzing a trouble from error messages.

To cope with these problems, Fujitsu Limited, a member of PGECons, delivers customers a list of error messages sorted by SQLSTATE codes to search the corrective actions. In the list, an identifier is added to each item so that customers immediately decide corrective actions and communicate smoothly with support staffs.

Based on our activities above, we will propose error message systems which will bring following two merits:

  • accelerate decisions on corrective actions
  • enhance the self support by users

In this presentation, we will show the needs and actions from members of PGECons as enterprise users, to share the way of improvement, which should help promote PostgreSQL among the community.