15 June 2017 Andrey Ivanov
One of the leading independent software vendors in educational domain needed to expand their original Oracle database system. They wanted to add a new PostgreSQL database running on AW...
Typical challenges that we see
PostgreSQL is a great open-source database for most of the traditional relational database workloads. Many of the customers we work with who use PostgreSQL database, especially the developer teams, appreciate open-source tools for source control, container support, and application performance management. However, we work a lot with the database administrator teams and we’ve seen some common threads of challenges that they face with PostgreSQL deployments.
PostgreSQL databases that are deployed by application developers
Due to the pure open-source distribution of PostgreSQL using on-premise or cloud deployments may force your application development team to straggle together various extensions for high availability, disaster recovery, database replication, and auditing.
Our DBMSys platform can help you avoid these problems. DBMSys provides reports on whether servers do or do not comply with these best practices.
We also recommend running PostgreSQL database in the cloud using a managed service which handles automatic backups, database replicas, and other manageability features for improved business continuity. These include Azure Database Service for PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS/Aurora for PostgreSQL and Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL.
Not sure what PostgreSQL databases should move to the cloud.
Moving PostgreSQL databases to a managed service like Azure Database Service for PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS/Aurora for PostgreSQL, and Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL is a great idea! However, how do I make a choice on what can move based on applications needs and what it will cost?
Again, DBMSys to the rescue. DBMSys monitors your PostgreSQL database performance using metrics like CPU, disk latency, network latency, memory usage, along with features used to quickly identify which of your PostgreSQL databases are “cloud-ready” based on the different capabilities of Azure, Amazon, and Google Clouds.
DBMSys then creates a detailed report that recommends how you should deploy to the cloud and how much it will cost. Specifically, it can make recommendations to go with a virtual machine running the database platform, or used one of the managed services that are correctly sized based on actual usage.
Slow running data warehouse queries
When running queries that use aggregations over billions of rows in a fact table, queries run much slower than other database solutions that use columnar technologies.
PostgreSQL lacks the features at this time for data warehouse workloads as part of the default installation. There are open-source extensions like cstore_fdw, but no one in the open-source community has used it to publish benchmark results for TPC-H. In general, we don’t recommend PostgreSQL for data warehouse queries.
For data warehouse workloads on premises, we typically recommend SQL Server with columnstore indexes. For cloud, we recommend going with the managed offerings like Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, or Google BigQuery.
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Using PostgreSQL in cloud alongside with Oracle to enhance the database system performance
One of the leading independent software vendors in the education market needed to expand their original Oracle database system.
They wanted to add a new PostgreSQL database running at AWS RDS to their original system and upgrade the connected Java application to support both database platforms.
We came up with a proof of concept and converted one of the largest customer’s database schemas to PostgreSQL, demonstrating how the upgraded system can work.
To do so, we updated the application by adding the unified SQL code and changing its architecture to support both Oracle and PostgreSQL database platforms.
Also, we kept the databases in these two platforms synchronized.
In the end, the customer received the following benefits:
- Meeting the latest industry security standards with the new cloud database platform;
- Ability to opt for compatibility either with Oracle or PostgreSQL while building an application;
- Received the documentation including a set of best practices for developing the unified source code of the Java application to ensure compatibility with both database platforms.
Watch the following video to learn more about the technical approach that we’ve used for code unification.
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Technologies used with PostgreSQL
Here are some of the technologies that we use at DB Best to help you manage and migrate your PostgreSQL solutions.
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Blog posts
We have a great set of blog posts related to migrating your on-premises deployments of PostgreSQL to AWS. In addition, you can read about our experience in migrating from Oracle to AWS RDS and Aurora PostgreSQL services.
Using PostgreSQL in cloud alongside with Oracle to enhance the database system performance
Improve PostgreSQL Performance 12X by Migrating to Amazon Aurora with Minimal Downtime
17 May 2018 Bill Ramos
An online marketplace company managed a 6-terabyte database using an old version of Amazon RDS PostgreSQL version 9.3. With the gaining popularity of their platform, they needed a way ...
Oracle to PostgreSQL migration with AWS SCT: How to convert INSERT ALL statement
19 June 2017 Andrey Ivanov
In Oracle you may use the conditional insert clauses, for example, an INSERT ALL statement to add multiple rows with a single command. You can insert rows into one table or even multip...
Oracle to PostgreSQL migration with AWS SCT: How to handle unsupported data types
2 March 2017 Bill Ramos
Oracle’s subtype declaration allows creating an "alias" for some datatype declaration, which can be re-used later as many times as needed. PostgreSQL domains do not match Oracle's su...
Reference white paper
Check out our new eBook on our Oracle to Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL service.
Migrate from Oracle to Amazon Aurora with DB Best ebook
13 January 2018 Bill Ramos
If your organization is heavily invested in a legacy Oracle database environment, you may be confronted with rising license renewal and support/maintenance costs for outdated technolog...
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