[Babase] Re: babase speed
Karl O. Pinc
kop at meme.com
Fri May 12 13:24:28 EDT 2006
On 05/11/2006 03:54:48 PM, Leah Gerber wrote:
> Hi Karl,
>
> I spent quite a lot of time with Hunter talking about babase. He came
> down and we ran some of those queries on the web and through ssh. His
> suggestions are as follows:
>
> 1. Have 2000 rows per page
Ok, done.
> 2. try Opera as a browser instead of mozilla. we tried it and it is a
> bit faster
Is it faster enough to make a difference? I'd be more inclined
to enhance phppgadmin so that it outputs query results
as pre-formatted text. That makes a _big_ difference.
Opera's now free of charge, so that makes it easy for
people to install it on their own machines. (See below.)
> 3. Look into pgAdmin III as a front end. *** He really recommends
> trying this but hasn't used it before
Now that this runs on Windows and Mac, and now that postgres
has secure, encrypted, database connections this is a good
idea. The one thing I don't like about this is that
it requires software be installed on the machine
you're typing on. It won't be a problem for you but
might be a problem at Princeton, and is one more barrier
for those who'd access Babase at home etc. But seeing
as how people won't have X windows installed at home
there's no difference between this and any of the X
based solutions. The other thing running client software
on the desktop means is that when we upgrade the server
people may need to upgrade their desktop front-end
software. It's not like this happens often, but
it's an issue.
I have turned on SSL enryption in postgres and
are now allowing (only) encrypted connections directly
to the database from the internet. Out of paranoia
I have configured postgres to authenticate users using
the Unix PAM method, the same method it uses to authenticate
when you login to the Unix prompt on papio. This means
that you do _not_ use the database username/password, you use
the Unix username/password. I have done this so that
the full weight of Unix security is behind login authentication.
The downside is that people must have Unix passwords, and
have access to papio's Unix prompt. I don't see this
as much of a downside. It could even be a benefit because,
if we want to go this route, we have a single username/password
rather than a Unix password and a Babase database username/password.
(Then I don't have to be the one setting up passwords.
Perhaps Hunter can set it up so that there's a Babase
password that is associated with the database, and/or
the papio Unix prompt, as desired. This also gives us
a single username/password that I don't have to administer.)
There is a problem though. While I can login securely
to Babase from within Duke's network, I cannot do
so from the Internet at large. Some firewall
at Duke is in the way. This is a _big_ problem,
because we could not use phpAdmin III, or any other sort
of direct-connect front-end from Princeton or anywhere
but Duke. I would hope that Hunter is satisfied with
the security precautions taken and can fix this.
If not, we can always tunnel through ssh, but that's
another configuration hassle to go through on the
client side and logging in to papio with ssh
is another step to go through each time you want
to use Babase. (Just like what Leah and I had
to do to use the X based front-ends.)
(Leah/Catherine, if you want to install phpAdmin III
and try it out by tunneling through ssh let me know
and I'll talk you through the ssh part. Actually,
at the present moment, Leah can just install phpAdmin III
and use it. It's Cathrine, not being at Duke,
that's blocked by the firewall.)
I have asked Hunter to comment on the above.
> 4. Look into Grnome DB thing (another x11 program)
This also sounds like a good idea. I have not installed
it for you to try out as it does not seem to be in
the Duke yum software repository (Hunter? It's not
in Fedora at all AFIK.) This is not really an issue
as, like tora, at present I'm using a newer version
of Postgres and I'd have to put in a newer version
of Gnome-db to get it to work just right. But,
I figure it's not worth spending the hour or so
until we have a talk about all this.
Screenshots can be found here: http://www.gnome-db.org/screenshots.php
I like the graphical query maker that works from
the ER diagrams.
>
> Any ideas on these suggestions?
I think I could pretty quickly come up with an icon for
people's desktops that launch X based solutions, although
that would require a specific ssh environment be installed
on each person's workstations and that could mean issues
with institutional IT support.
We have to investigate things like downloading data from the
DB to excel/whatever for each, or decide to use different
programs for different things. No particular reason
why we can't use all of them, although it'd be nice to
have whatever we use be "stock", come with whatever
else we're using, just so that I don't have to do any
work come time Hunter wants to upgrade the server
or anybody gets a desktop upgrade in the case of
client-side programs.
>
> By the way, the database seems to be running much faster today than
> yesterday. I was able to do the same queries without as much trouble.
Probably because I wasn't beating the server to death
with a conversion. Also, FWIW, it gets faster after
you've run some queries. The caching brings your
data into RAM once it figures out what data you've
a tendency to work with. The new postgres has better
indexing. I might be able to delete some indexes
and get it so the whole db fits in RAM. Another
thing to get around to eventually.
>
>
> Leah
>
Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
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