Data Warehousing with Greenplum

Chapter 6. Monitoring and Managing Greenplum

Managing an MPP database bears some similarities to managing a PostgreSQL database, yet introduces other challenges that single-instance databases do not pose. Greenplum provides a set of tools that facilitate its management. Many management tasks begin with monitoring. What’s the current state of Greenplum? Users complained of slow performance yesterday at 2 p.m. What was happening? Is the storage filling up? What’s the gating factor that’s affecting performance? Is there sufficient memory to handle concurrent loads and analytics? Are runaway ad hoc queries hogging the system and preventing other users from getting their work done?

These are the kinds of questions addressed by Greenplum Command Center, a utility bundled with Pivotal Greenplum, the commercial version of the Greenplum Database.

Greenplum Command Center

Tim McCoy

A major task for database administrators (DBAs) is workload management. To do this efficiently requires tools that accurately and quickly answer questions about current and past system performance. A common occurrence is the user who tells the DBA that a query that has run well in the past ran poorly yesterday at 2 p.m. Another is a query that seems to be running forever and consuming resources that are impeding the performance of concurrently running queries. Yet another common situation is a query that seems to have hanged. The aforementioned use cases require a monitoring tool and a method of controlling ...