Re: ZFS filesystem - supported ?

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

On Saturday, October 23rd, 2021 at 18:48, Mladen Gogala <gogala(dot)mladen(at)gmail(dot)com> 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.
>
>

Thank you Mladen for your very useful food for thought.

I think my plan going forward will be to stick to the old XFS+LVM setup and (maybe) when I have some more time on my hands fire up a secondary instance with ZFS and do some experimentation with pgio.

Thanks again !