On 2021-10-24 06:48, Mladen Gogala wrote:
On 10/23/21 09:37, Laura Smith wrote:
Hi Mladen,
Yes indeed, snapshots is the primary reason, closely followed by
zfssend/receive.
I'm no stranger to using LVM snapshots with ext4/xfs but it requires a
custom shell script to manage the whole process around backups. I
feel the whole thing could well be a lot cleaner with zfs.
Thank you for the links, I will take a look.
Laura
Yes, ZFS is extremely convenient. It's a volume manager and a file
system, all rolled into one, with some additiional convenient tools.
However, performance is a major concern. If your application is OLTP,
ZFS might be a tad too slow for your performance requirements. On the
other hand, snapshots can save you a lot of time with backups,
especially if you have some commercial backup capable of multiple
readers. If your application is OLTP, ZFS might be a tad too slow for
your performance requirements. The only way to find out is to test. The
ideal tool for testing is pgio:
https://kevinclosson.net/2019/09/21/announcing-pgio-the-slob-method-for-postgresql-is-released-under-apache-2-0-and-available-at-github/
For those who do not know, Kevin Closson was the technical architect
who has built both Exadata and EMC XTRemIO. He is now the principal
engineer of the Amazon RDS. This part is intended only for those who
would tell him that "Oracle has it is not good enough" if he ever
decided to post here.
Interesting subject... I'm working on a migration from PG 9.2 to PG 14
and was wondering which File System should I use. Looking at this
thread, looks like I should keep using ext4.
I don't know where you have your database deployed, but in my case is in
AWS EC2 instances. The way I handle backups is at the block storage
level, performing EBS snapshots.
This has proven to work very well for me. I had to restore a few backups
already and it always worked. The bad part is that I need to stop the
database before performing the Snapshot, for data integrity, so that
means that I have a hot-standby server only for these snapshots.
Lucas
