Curious how other people run these kinds of experiments on their production data in a safe way that does not affect performance of prod. Eg how do you avoid CPU spikes in prod that might effect users?
If the database is too big, just use last N amount of rows from the database instead of a full dump.
Bonus points if you log actual SQL queries that happen in production to a log file, so you can then re-run last X queries against your new test-production database and log the total run time. After doing bunch of optimizations, you can re-run your little benchmark and see how it compares.
Be careful with the last n rows approach, you have to have an understanding of how the query scales to do this effectively (ie. your n rows are at an appropriate scale to optimise). I assume that if you are at a small enough scale that you are asking this question, restoring the whole backup is the best option.
This is infrastructure level stuff that someone else should run.
so most of the time, both things are good.
there is also:
- Barman
- pg_probackup
(P.S: with archiving you can even have a "delayed" downstream cluster)
For SQL optimization purposes, you cannot do that – there are high chances you'll get different query plans.
And as I already mentioned in my other comments here, thin cloning is a great way to solve the speed (and money) problem for larger DBs.
You can do `select * from pg_stat_user_tables` to see how many table have had (1) a full sequential scan, (2) how many records have been traversed by sequential scans, (3) how many index scans, and (4) how many records have been scanned using indexes.
You can also do `select * from pg_stat_user_indexes` to see (1) which indexes have or have not been used, (2) how many times they've been used, and (3) how many records have been crawled using each index.
Using this information, you would deduce which indexes to add/remove, and but you would still need to figure out which queries are not hitting indexes (an exercise for the reader).
If you save these stats once a day (e.g. using `pg_cron` to copy to a new table with a timestamp), you will be able to monitor over time whether an index should be added/removed
[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/14/monitoring-stats.html
Ideally, absolutely the same physically, to keep the same physical layout as on prod – bloat, etc – though, sometimes it's not allowed.
Another problem here is that for each experiment, you might need a new environment. Plus, in larger teams, many people might want to do this work at the same time – so you end up combining efforts, synchronizing them, sharing environments. It slows you down. Or increases your cloud spending a lot.
This is a kind of problem Steve Jobs described in his famous 1980 speech [1] about Apple: if we give each person their own computer, something special happens compared to the case when 10 persons share a single computer. Here it is the same: if we can give each engineer their own full-size DB copy for experiments, something special happens. They start moving much, much faster. SQL quality improves. DB changes (DDL, massive DML) stop failing. Finally, engineers start learning SQL, it's an eye-opener – they now can see how it works on large volumes (because they didn't have good environments for experiments before!)
This is what we (Postgres.ai) have learned over the last couple of years developing Database Lab Engine [2]. It's an open-source tool for superfast cloning of Postgres databases of any size, based on copy-on-write provided by ZFS or LVM. On a single machine, you can have dozens of full-size clones up and running, conduct a lot of experiments at the same time, and still be paying only for 1 machine. And clone provisioning takes only a few seconds, it feels like magic. But the main magic is how engineering processes change.
One of great use cases is how GitLab uses it for Postgres query optimization and change control [3].
[1] https://youtu.be/0lvMgMrNDlg?t=586