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I was wondering if anyone here has any experience installing Postgres-XL, the new open-source multi-thread version of PostgreSQL. I'm planning to migrate a 1-2 TB set of databases from regular Postgres 9.3 to XL and was wondering if anyone here has any advice or any online resources (besides the link above) that they could point me to. Specifically on how to set up the installation to work on a single-machine installation -- the idea here is to take advantage of the multiple (8) processor cores for faster (parallelized) queries.

I'm on RHEL 6.5 on an HP ProLiant DL380p (Gen8) with 8 cores, 32Gb RAM and a few 10k-rpm drives in a RAID 5 configuration.

Thanks!

Serban Tanasa
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2 Answers2

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So was searching around the same topic. Easiest way would be to use docker, heres a blog post about it Postgres-XL: a docker container

And here you can find quite recent instructions how to deploy onto single rhel machine using Chef. Deploying Postgres-XL in 2-minutes with Chef/serverspec

kakoni
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You might be misunderstanding what Posgres-XL is. It is not for multi-threading as you describe. All databases are multi-threading. Posgres-XL is for very large multi-node clusters to support very large scale parallel processing. It requires a minimum of two nodes just for a base setup. One node for the transaction manger, and one for a coordinator and data node. If you want to run on one node then you should just use standard Postgres. Running Postgres-XL on a single node would be extremely slow and pointless.

BrianC
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  • Are you sure that postgresxl is not able to use several core for the same query like it is able to use several nodes ? – user1767316 Sep 10 '19 at 05:29
  • This has nothing to do with cores. Postgres-XL is a clustered application. Everything about it is designed to be used over many servers. It makes no sense to install all the components of it on one server. If you want to run on one server you should just run Standard Postgres. – BrianC Sep 10 '19 at 15:51
  • Databases are highly multi-threaded, they will absolutely use multiple cores, the issue here is there is a performance penalty with clustered databases, but it is over come with lots of parallel processing. If you only want to use one server then you are MUCH better off not using Postgres-XL. – BrianC Sep 11 '19 at 18:27
  • Thanks @BrianC, I know the MPP nature of postgresXL, but reading the question, I sudently hoped the MPP principle could allow postgesxl to make use of all available cores for the same join query, where I thought postgres could use only one core per query. But I just read that there is some multicore query ablilities in postgres: postgresql.org/docs/10/parallel-query.html, good news to me. – user1767316 Sep 12 '19 at 05:19