Grant McAlister
Senior Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services
Grant McAlister is a Senior Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services where he works on RDS - Amazon's Relational Database Service, the service he helped found 10 years ago. Prior to AWS, Grant was responsible for the performance, scalability and availability of Amazon's databases. Before joining Amazon.com in 1999, Grant worked as an Independent Database Consultant and as a Senior Principal Consultant for Oracle Corporation. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science at the University of Alberta.
Upcoming presentations
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Past presentations
This talk will first introduce the different ways PostgreSQL can use memory, from the operating system, to cluster wide and then into per session and per operation. From there we will dive into specifics around different PostgreSQL parameters like shared_buffers, work_mem, maintenance_work_mem and how to set them depending on your workload. The presentation will also cover some of the lesser kn...
The first portion of the session will cover the critical reason why PostgreSQL generates these full page writes (FPW) and how to monitor the rate of generation. Next we will demonstrate the negative effect of full page writes on performance, scale, backups and replication. Then we will cover various techniques to decrease the amount of full page writes and improve your databases performance/sca...
Apr 21 2023
Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility is a relational database service that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. In this session, we review the functionality in order to understand the architectural differences that contribute to improved scalability, availability, and durability. You'll a...
This talk will first introduce the different ways PostgreSQL can use memory, from the operating system, to cluster wide and then into per session and per operation. From there we will dive into specifics around different PostgreSQL parameters like shared_buffers, work_mem, maintenance_work_mem and how to set them depending on your workload. The presentation will also cover some of the lesser kn...
In this session we will dive deep into HOT (Heap Only Tuple) update optimization. Utilizing this optimization can result in improved writes rates, less index bloat and reduced vacuum effort but to enable PostgreSQL to use this optimization may require changing your application design and database settings. We will examine how the number of indexes, frequency of updates, fillfactor and vacuum se...
Mar 21 2019
In this session we will dive deep into HOT (Heap Only Tuple) update optimization. Utilizing this optimization can result in improved writes rates, less index bloat and reduced vacuum effort but to enable PostgreSQL to use this optimization may require changing your application design and database settings. We will examine how the number of indexes, frequency of updates, fillfactor and vacuum se...
Oct 16 2018
We will do a deep dive into the exciting new features we recently released, including 9.6 support, new extensions, snapshot sharing, enhancements to encryption, vacuum and replication. We will also explore lessons we have learned managing a large fleet of PostgreSQL instances, including important tunables and possible gotchas around pg_upgrade. During the session we also cover our newly announc...
In this session we will begin with a quick overview of the Amazon RDS service and how it achieves durability and high availability. Then we will do a deep dive into the exciting new features we recently released, including 9.6, snapshot sharing, enhancements to encryption, vacuum, and replication. We will also explore lessons we have learned managing a large fleet of PostgreSQL instances, inclu...
This session will provide a brief overview of the RDS service, how it achieves durability & high availability and then do a deep dive into the exciting new features that we have released. We will also explore what we have learned by managing a large fleet of PostgreSQL instances including possible gotchas around pg_upgrade, advice on replication tunables, vacuum settings and shared_buffers incl...
This session will provide a brief overview of the RDS service and then do a deep dive into the new features that we have released in the last few months including Read Replicas and supporting trigger based replications solutions . During the session we will also discuss the lessons learned n running a large fleet of PostgreSQL instances including specific recommendations.
In this session we will cover a number of the way that you can tune PostgreSQL to better handle high write workloads. We will cover both application and database tuning methods as each type can have substantial benefits but can also interact in unexpected ways when you are operating at scale. On the application side we will look at write batching, use of GUID's, general index structure, the cos...