Useful Solaris tools for PostgreSQL DBAs

Sun engineers Robert Lor, Zdenek Kotala and Julius Stroffek will present four features of Solaris Nevada which can be extremely useful to PostgreSQL DBAs. Whether or not you already use Solaris, you can benefit by broadening the system tools available to you, particularly since some of these tools will be available in other operating systems soon.

Zones: Solaris's new service isolation tool improves on BSD Jails by offering facilities previously only available on mainframes ... the ability to limit CPU and RAM for each container, and thus each PostgreSQL instance. See a demo of this functionality and how to use it to improve your ability to host lots of third-party PostgreSQL applications.

DTrace: We've used DTrace to diagnose problems in PostgreSQL and improve 8.2. Now, join us to see how you can use DTrace to "walk up the web application stack" and try to find the bottlenecks in your entire application, rather than just a single component.

Service Management Facility: in addition to being a "init.d substitute" for Solaris, SMF has a number of other useful features that can improve PostgreSQL reliability, including automated recovery from DOS attacks and automated shutdown if hardware is dying.

ZFS: This advanced filesystem offers performance for data warehouses equivalent to other leading filesystems, with significantly better management tools and reliability. We'll discuss how to configure it for PostgreSQL and ways you can use it.

Sun Cluster: learn how Sun Cluster can be used to provide HA for PostgreSQL.