PostgreSQL Archives ~ fitzmoskal https://fitzmoskal.me/tag/postgresql/ You are _here_ Thu, 29 Feb 2024 15:59:09 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://fitzmoskal.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-result_880649-32x32.jpeg PostgreSQL Archives ~ fitzmoskal https://fitzmoskal.me/tag/postgresql/ 32 32 11678478 Egyptian Genomics Institute – Software Delivery https://fitzmoskal.me/egyptian-genomics-institute-software-delivery/ Mon, 26 Feb 2024 20:04:01 +0000 https://fitzmoskal.me/?p=1487 Software Delivery I managed the team that took part in a deployment of genomics analysis software to a government programme

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Software Delivery

I managed the team that took part in a deployment of genomics analysis software to a government programme based in Cairo Egypt worth £2m in total, I also acted as a hands-on technical lead.

I managed the resourcing of a consultant from China to attend for 3 weeks and had scheduled to be there on the first week. The deployment was time-sensitive and had to be completed on-premise in this window as we wouldn’t have remote access.

The consultant from China was delayed, so I had to use my technical skills to quickly get the install going having not performed one before. I did alone on the first day – a Sunday – and then brought in my other consultant and a DevOps resource on conference call for the following two days, until the Chinese consultant arrived. All this took place whilst the client was monitoring over my shoulder – so I had to present confidence in what I was doing at the same time. The software was successfully deployed inside of the 3 weeks. However there were some performance issues identifed.

Health Check

After concerns were raised by the client regarding performance – with accusations flying, I took the decision to prepare a mirror environment in our offices and we requested soem of their sample files to process and confirm that the software was capable of processing them – which it was. So the issues pointed to infrastructure.

I agreed to attend site with one of the product managers to perform a health check against the software and hardware. I had some input in what to look for from the DevOps team, but largely had to script the health check myself against Kubernetes, NFS and PostgreSQL. Onsite, I ran multiple tests and perfected the script which used a combination of tools including kubectl, docker, fio, iostat, mtr and netstat. With this I was able to narrow down the issue to packet loss between the application and NFS, which was hosted on a different network split by a switch or router – which was not as specified in the Solution Design we had outlined.

This helped to not only provide the customer with confidence in the solution and our commitment to support, but did prevent them from walking away from the contract as they had previously disputed ownership of the issue.

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]]> 1487 Digital Health Checks https://fitzmoskal.me/digital-health-checks/ Tue, 20 Feb 2024 19:37:14 +0000 https://fitzmoskal.me/?p=1378 During my time as a consultant I have worked to develop various digital health checks to assist companies with taking

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]]> During my time as a consultant I have worked to develop various digital health checks to assist companies with taking a tempurature test of their IT systems and strategy. The view of health checks is sometimes that they are just a tool to drum up more business – which to an extent is true, but the health checks I developed have been critical in assisting companies to identify risks, avoid costly mistakes and pinpoint the source of complaints.

I have developed comprehensive health checks for BMC Discovery, Kubernetes, NFS and PostgreSQL. I have also developed exception reporting on data pipelines for data quality assessment. The health checks I have developed have saved customers in the following areas:

  • Identified security vulnerabilities around plaintext usernames and passwords storage
  • Identified issues around NFS performance
  • Identified opportunities for license reclaimation
  • Identified usage patterns for insecure practices (i.e. logging in as root user)
  • Identified various misconfigurations in non-alignment with best practices

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]]> 1378 Investment Bank – ITAM & DB Migration https://fitzmoskal.me/investment-bank-itam/ Tue, 20 Feb 2024 15:57:32 +0000 https://fitzmoskal.me/?p=1321 I maintained a long-term relationship with a European Investment Bank based in Canary Wharf. As part of a team of

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I maintained a long-term relationship with a European Investment Bank based in Canary Wharf. As part of a team of consultants we had repeat work to maintain and upgrade their ITAM solution. I personally delivered on a 3-week critical project to facilitate a database migration. This involved liaising with lead DBAs to extract metadata from MS SQL, PostgreSQL and Sybase databases for the solution architecture.

This was a sensitive project given the job threat to the existing DBA SMEs. I faced open hostility from one SME in particular who’s tactic was to delay providing information and not respond to emails.

I resolved this with face to face contact, without letting any request go unanswered. I also used low-level escalation to my project sponsor. This did result in a tactical complaint from the SME to the project board, however my sponsor was satisfied with my approach, hitting their 3-week deadline and no fault could be found. I resolved not to make matters personal, which is how I managed to stay focused on delivery.

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