Question about Postgres

From: NetComrade <netcomradeNSPAM_at_bookexchange.net>
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2007 13:51:31 -0400
Message-ID: <9kkha3dlk1oobm7i38hjbarailvoubfltt@4ax.com>

I apologize for cross-posting, but I need some help w/o too many advices RTFM :). After Oracle and MySQL, this becomes the third product that I need to learn to some degree, and I need a few links which would provide a 'quick tutorial' especially for folks with Oracle background like myself. Last time I had to deal with MySql it took me a few days just to figure out how to login, and then how to poke around, and then a few more to finally start writing some useful code in whatever language they use that's similar to PL/SQL.

We are running a mail server, which for whatever stupid reason uses a database (stupid, b/c it only uses it for web access, mail is actually on the file system)

I'd like to know a couple of things

a) how do I access this thing as a DBA to poke around
b) how do I poke around
c) do I need to make any modifications to config file
d) what is the most common 'default' values that need to be changed
     what's the best way to see what a performance bottleneck is (i

e) why this doesn't work:
[root_at_mt-adm httpd]# vacuumdb -a -f -z -q -h 10.0.1.93 -p5733 vacuumdb: could not connect to database template1: FATAL: no pg_hba.conf entry for host "10.0.1.93", user "root", database "template1", SSL off

Some 'details' on the server: (ps -ef)
00:00:04 /usr/bin/postmaster -i -h mt-adm.mentora.biz -p 5733 -D /var/opt/scalix/mm/postgres/data -k /var/opt/scalix/mm/postgres/data

00:00:00 postgres: stats buffer process
00:00:00 postgres: stats collector process
00:00:00 /usr/bin/postmaster -p 5432 -D /var/lib/pgsql/data
00:00:00 postgres: stats buffer process
00:00:00 postgres: stats collector process

The above is confusing.. do I have 2 instances (or databases) running on different ports? Should I shutdown the default one? (Scalix is the product that uses the db)

Should I be 'playing' with
/var/opt/scalix/mm/postgres/data/postgresql.conf ?

[root_at_mt-adm httpd]# du -skh /var/opt/scalix/mm/postgres/data 276M /var/opt/scalix/mm/postgres/data

# "database" is rather small

# there are no more than 20-30 users on the server at any given time
# the disks are fast (50megs/sec, RAID10, SCSI)
# memory is big 8g
# cpu count is 2 with hyperthreading (it's a dell 2650)

[root_at_mt-adm data]# rpm -qa|grep post

postgresql-libs-7.4.17-1.RHEL4.1
postgresql-server-7.4.17-1.RHEL4.1
postgresql-7.4.17-1.RHEL4.1

scalix-postgres-11.0.4.25-1

Files that seem important:
/var/opt/scalix/mm/postgres/data

[root_at_mt-adm data]# cat pg_hba.conf|grep -v \#

host    scalix      scalix      10.0.1.201/32   md5
local  all    all             ident   sameuser

postgresql.conf (comments taken out)
max_connections = 100

shared_buffers = 1000         


# bunch of locale params en_US.UTF-8'

http://www.scalix.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7809&highlight=sharedbuffers

There are some suggestions here, but they seem rather high (I did look at some of them ,and the majorify make sense tweaking, I don't think I fully understood the vacuum paramter)
.......
We run Oracle 9iR2,10gR1/2 on RH4/RH3 and Solaris 10 (Sparc) remove NSPAM to email Received on Thu Jul 26 2007 - 12:51:31 CDT