Lloyd Albin
Principal Database Administrator at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
I have been a PostgreSQL administrator since 2002 and have worked for Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center since 2008. Within Fred Hutch, I work for the largest group called SCHARP, Statistical Center for HIV/AIDS Research and Prevention.
In 2010 I started SeaPUG, Seattle Postgres Users Group, at the request of Josh Drake. I present at least half the presentations there every year. I started the PostgreSQL track at LinuxFest Northwest in 2014 after my GIS presentation in 2013 was standing room only. In 2017 I got a booth at the SeaGL, Seattle GNU Linux, conference with the idea of having a booth there in 2018 along with also doing a PostgreSQL presentation at the conference. In 2017 I started presenting at various PostgresConf Conferences.
I have also discovered several PostgreSQL bugs which have been fixed, some of them affected every version of PostgreSQL.
Bug numbers:
- 7553 - Variant of the what alias to use after a rename bug in views - Fixed in 9.3
- 8173 - Inserting heap tuples in bulk in COPY patch return wrong line on failure 999 out of 1000 times. - Fixed in 9.2.5 & 9.3
- 8257 - Multi-Core Restore fails when containing index comments - Fixed in 8.4, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3
- 8291 - postgres_fdw does not re-read USER MAPING after change - Updated Docs in 9.3
- 8545 - pg_dump does not backup database level globals - Fixed in 11
- 14147 - Restoration of Materialized View of Foreign Data Tables fails - Fixed in 10
- 15182 - Major Bug - Affecting all versions of PostgreSQL. Partially fixed in 11 and fully fixed in 12
- 15316 - Creation of check constraint functions that rely on data loaded alphabetically after your primary data will fail to restore properly.
I host the Seattle Postgres Users Group where I give many of the presentations. I have many of the presentations posted at Lloyd's Presentations
Upcoming presentations
No upcoming presentations...
Past presentations
- Installing PostGIS
- Cloud Solutions
- From Source
- Aviation Math
- Airplane Performance
- Great Circle Math
- PostGIS Math
- Updating your table...
- Installing PostGIS
- Cloud Solutions
- From Source
- Aviation Math
- Airplane Performance
- Great Circle Math
- PostGIS Math
- Updating your table...
- Installing PostGIS
- Cloud Solutions
- From Source
- Aviation Math
- Airplane Performance
- Great Circle Math
- PostGIS Math
- Updating your table...
I have been asked many times by other PostgreSQL DBA's about what could be causing queries to run progressively slower while their application is running but then runs fast again after the application is stopped and restarted a short time later or the database is reloaded from backup and now runs fast again. These can all be symptoms of AutoVacuum/AutoAnalyze/Index issues.
Some of the slow ...
Mar 21 2025
Profiling PostgreSQL itself to find the slowdown within PostgreSQL
Profiling the COPY command while using Minimal WAL files to find the 300x speed difference
At work we bought a brand new server. When testing our in house app against the new server, we found it took 7.5 hours. This same app running against our 7 year old hardware using the same version of PostgreSQL takes only 45 minutes. I was able to track this down to the COPY command the new server being 100 times slower than our 7 year old server. At first I blamed Ubuntu since we had been runn...
A shadow table is an table that is read and written by a trigger function and contains data similar to (in the same format as) its primary table, which is the table it's "shadowing" along with a few extra fields so that you can time travel the shadow table and know who did what and when. In this presentation we will cover traditional Shadow Tables which works with all current version of Postgre...
Oct 8 2019
I was recently asked by another PostgreSQL DBA about what could be causing queries to run slow while their application is running but then runs fast again after the application is stopped. While I have given several presentations on this subject, each one has been on a specific cause and not talking about all of them together. I decided I would compile them into a single tuning and monitoring p...
Oct 8 2019
I was recently asked by another PostgreSQL DBA about what could be causing queries to run slow while their application is running but then runs fast again after the application is stopped. While I have given several presentations on this subject, each one has been on a specific cause and not talking about all of them together. I decided I would compile them into a single tuning and monitoring p...
Sep 20 2019
A shadow table is an table that is read and written by a trigger function and contains data similar to (in the same format as) its primary table, which is the table it's "shadowing" along with a few extra fields so that you can time travel the shadow table and know who did what and when. In this presentation we will cover traditional Shadow Tables which works with all current version of Postgre...
Mar 22 2019
We ran across a use case where we needed to restrict people's access to the data by requiring them to belong to 2 or more groups. Most people would create a third group and make the two groups, members of this new group. The extra group was not wanted for various reasons but PostgreSQL by default does not support tying the permissions together for more than one role/group.
In our use case, w...
Oct 16 2018
In this presentation we will go over the old school math and the new school PostGIS method of doing the same math for calculating the distance and cost of an aircraft flight. You will notice how much easier it is to use PostGIS.
Nov 14 2017
In this presentation we will go over the old school math and the new school PostGIS method of doing the same math for calculating the distance and cost of an aircraft flight. You will notice how much easier it is to use PostGIS.
In this presentation we will go over the old school math and the new school PostGIS method of doing the same math for calculating the distance and cost of an aircraft flight. You will notice how much easier it is to use PostGIS.
Apr 19 2018