Mark Wong

Senior Software Developer

Mark Wong is a Senior Software Developer at EDB and a PostgreSQL Major Contributor. His background is in database systems solutions and performance. He first introduced himself to the PostgreSQL community in 2003 with open source benchmarking kits and performance data. Since then, he has continued to contribute to various aspects of the PostgreSQL community such as a Google Summer of Code mentor, Conference Organizer, Portland PostgreSQL Users Group Co-Organizer, PostgreSQL Fundraising Group Member, and Director on Board of the United States PostgreSQL Association.

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Technical Blog

PostgreSQL Award

PostgreSQL was presented with the 2019 O’Reilly Open Source Award for Lifetime Achievement in Portland, Oregon, Thursday July 18th during OSCON. I had the honor of accepting that award alongside Bruce Momjian and Christophe Pettus. Starting last year in 2018, these awards were presented to projects and the first Lifetime Achievement award was given to Linux. It’s quite a distinction to be...
Technical Blog

Visualizing sar data

Hopefully you are now regularly collecting system statistics after reading Tomas Vondra’s defense of using sar. If you don’t have anything in place that readily visualizes the data, I have some examples that you can hopefully build off on to see everything you need to see. In addition to sar, the sysstat package also has a utility called sadf to display collected data. Simply running sadf without...
Technical Blog

SCALE 14x

I had the pleasure of speaking about PostgreSQL performance at The 14th Annual Southern California Linux Expo and meeting many enthusiastic database users in the expo hall. There was a great turnout of people attending the conference, and many PostgreSQL presentations to see. Simon Riggs also talked about SERIALIZABLE, Eventual Consistency and Really Scary Stuff. Thanks to everyone who came to...
Technical Blog

Testing Postgres-XL with DBT-3

As people have been working on merging Postgres-XL with the PostgreSQL 9.5 branch, I’ve been trying out Postgres-XL’s ability to run a decision support-like workload. The DBT-3 test kit, originally developed at the OSDL as a TPC-H derivative, has some new changes so that it can run against Postgres-XL. I’ll describe how to use DBT-3 and what you can expect it to tell you. What is DBT-3? DBT-3 is...
Technical Blog

Index Overhead on a Growing Table

This another simple test in continuation from last time. We will start with the same lineitem table as in the previous example. We will measure the time it takes to load the same 7.2GB text file repeatedly until the table size grows to about 1TB. We create a baseline with a table that has no indexes built on it. Then repeat with a B-tree index on the l_shipdate DATE column, and again after...
Technical Blog

Loading Tables and Creating B-tree and Block Range Indexes

I have been looking at the new Block Range Indexes (BRIN) being developed for PostgreSQL 9.5. BRIN indexes are designed to provide similar benefits to partitioning, especially for large tables, just without the need to declare partitions. That sounds pretty good but let’s look in greater detail to see if it lives up to the hype. How large? Here’s one data point. Using the TPC Benchmark(TM) H...