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"Aurora Postgres doesn't have a filesystem for its tablespace. It has a block store. Instead, Aurora Postgres instances that are doing large sorts or indexing l

"Aurora Postgres doesn't have a filesystem for its tablespace. It has a block store. Instead, Aurora Postgres instances that are doing large sorts or indexing large files use local storage, which is currently 2x the size of memory. That is, if an Aurora database instance has 72gb of memory, you only have 144gb of temporary space. Good luck sorting that 150gb table." That seems like a problem that's easy to overcome. Allow people to configure the local storage size and you have a reasonably fair solution. Still has its limitations for really large datasets, but that's also one you have with vanilla postgres.

wazokazi 9y ago
As mentioned in the article, the ability seamless failover to replica significantly reduces MTTR when the primary/master node fails. Also, Performance Insights (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_PerfInsights.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_...) is really helpful chasing down slow/resource intensive queries. That said, building a large, scalable Database still requires understanding the workloads and testing them out on production sized datasets. No easy button yet!
- stingraycharles 9y ago
  Are you sure you're commenting on the correct thread ?
  - wazokazi 9y ago
    That was supposed to be comment on the parent/original post. Sorry about that.
brlewis 9y ago
Also "good luck sorting..." makes it sound like such sorting is impossible. It's just slower. https://madusudanan.com/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-sorting-in-postgres/#DiskMerge https://madusudanan.com/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-sort...
- znep 9y ago
  I'm not clear what you are trying to suggest with that link. The whole point of the claim in the article around sorting is that in Aurora, for using disk to sort, postgres only has access to a relatively small filesystem that runs out of space and can't use the Aurora storage that is actually backing the database.

wazokazi 9y ago

As mentioned in the article, the ability seamless failover to replica significantly reduces MTTR when the primary/master node fails. Also, Performance Insights (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_PerfInsights.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_...) is really helpful chasing down slow/resource intensive queries. That said, building a large, scalable Database still requires understanding the workloads and testing them out on production sized datasets. No easy button yet!

stingraycharles 9y ago
Are you sure you're commenting on the correct thread ?
- wazokazi 9y ago
  That was supposed to be comment on the parent/original post. Sorry about that.

brlewis 9y ago

Also "good luck sorting..." makes it sound like such sorting is impossible. It's just slower. https://madusudanan.com/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-sorting-in-postgres/#DiskMerge https://madusudanan.com/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-sort...

znep 9y ago
I'm not clear what you are trying to suggest with that link. The whole point of the claim in the article around sorting is that in Aurora, for using disk to sort, postgres only has access to a relatively small filesystem that runs out of space and can't use the Aurora storage that is actually backing the database.