Welcome to our PostgreSQL® Competence Center!
Here you receive all PostgreSQL® services from a single source.
As one of the longest-running and most successful open-source projects, PostgreSQL® has evolved into one of the leading object-relational database systems, offering an extremely powerful and equivalent alternative to available proprietary database systems.
What is the PostgreSQL® Competence Center?
With our PostgreSQL® Competence Center, we support the entire PostgreSQL® life cycle in your organization. From the initial consultation onward, our PostgreSQL® Competence Center is available as a reliable and competent point of contact.
We support you with your migration projects, provide operational support on request, or fully assume operation of your entire PostgreSQL® environment.
Our PostgreSQL® team supports you with all questions related to PostgreSQL®. This naturally includes topics such as high availability, clustering and replication, tuning and optimization, customized monitoring environments, as well as development services and individual workshops and training sessions.
What is PostgreSQL®?
PostgreSQL® is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) that is freely available as open-source software and may be downloaded and used without licensing.
POSTGRES was originally developed as an academic project at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department. Since then, many developers around the world have continued working on this code, and the project was renamed PostgreSQL® in 1996.
PostgreSQL® is rightly referred to as “the most advanced open-source database system” and supports the SQL92 and SQL99 standards. In addition, PostgreSQL® offers a range of its own extensions.
PostgreSQL® Support
Our service and support provides you with professional and comprehensive assistance for PostgreSQL®.
Databases in particular hold very important or even strategic significance in enterprise environments. With our support, you secure the operation of your PostgreSQL® databases in business-critical operations just as you would when using proprietary, commercial software.
Our support model offers you many advantages that you will only find with us:
- no dependency on the number of deployed servers and CPUs or the number of users
- unlimited scaling of the number of deployed PostgreSQL® databases without changes to support costs
- guaranteed response times
- 24×7 support 365 days a year
- 3rd-level support at developer level
- direct support in German by the PostgreSQL® team at credativ GmbH
- support via telephone, email, remote service, and on-site
- time-unit-based support models
- support for the entire PostgreSQL® / open-source environment
- additional support from the entire team of the German Open Source Support Center
- individual service level agreements
Consulting
We offer you comprehensive consulting and cover all areas of using PostgreSQL® in enterprise environments with our services, from initial planning to productive deployment. We accompany you through the entire PostgreSQL® life cycle.
- Design
- Selection and optimization of the technical platform
- Scaling, performance
- Big data
- Security
- High-availability concepts
- Clustering and replication
- Backup
- Database monitoring
- Migration
Deep-Level Services
Our PostgreSQL® Competence Center is also available for services that go far beyond standard support.
Our team is familiar with PostgreSQL® down to the code level and will help you even when things get really deep.
In a database system, schema design plays a major role.
Constraints ensure data consistency. Performance depends critically on proper normalization.
We are happy to support you with schema design, regardless of whether the goal is data storage with maximum consistency and semantic accuracy in ideal normalization or performance maximization through star schemas in your data warehouse.
Performance problems with PostgreSQL® deployment? Wherever the bottleneck is, we quickly identify it and present solutions.
These can be of the most varied nature, such as tuning the schema or PostgreSQL® configuration, changing cost model parameters, rewriting inefficient stored procedures in C as a PostgreSQL® extension, or even with the clear statement that “more hardware” is the only solution.
Thanks to Postgres’ amortizing query analysis, critical queries can be quickly identified.
When looking at the query plan with EXPLAIN, you can also see the exact technical reason for a query’s undesirable performance behavior. While simple problems—such as a missing index—can be quickly identified and resolved here, problems occasionally run deeper. A plan can, for example, also be poor due to unfavorable parameterization of the cost model, or because the planner lacks suitable statistics for selecting a good query plan.
Here you can draw on our many years of experience puzzling with query plans, gladly together with appropriate knowledge transfer.
PostgreSQL® has long since ceased to be tied to a single node.
With various replication solutions, cluster systems can be built for different requirements.
Depending on whether the focus is high availability or load balancing, different replication solutions and configurations are used.
Did you know that Skype’s worldwide telephony infrastructure uses PostgreSQL®?
Of course, this is no longer possible with a single instance, but requires load balancing across thousands of nodes.
Whether 2 or 1,000 instances, we know the techniques for proper load balancing with PostgreSQL® and are happy to advise you.
The PostgreSQL® ecosystem has demonstrated stability for years. Nevertheless, problems occasionally occur, whether in the PostgreSQL® core, extensions, monitoring, or backup solutions.
The PostgreSQL® Competence Center helps you detect errors early through proactive patch management for your open-source products. Additionally, our team supports you with critical bugs, from detection through the bug fix itself to integration into upstream.
Furthermore, we also offer extended LTS support for certain versions of the popular database. More information can be found here.
One often hears in hindsight that an expensive incident could have been avoided by an expert review of the system.
If you have business-critical databases whose health status is unknown to you, we are happy to examine them with our many years of experience.
Although relational databases currently have a somewhat non-agile reputation, we are completely open to agile methods with PostgreSQL®.
In our experience, pair programming between application development and PostgreSQL® veterans can be very effective.
Of course, only if your SCRUM master sees it that way as well…
Operational Support and Operational Takeover
With our operational support, we are always there for you. We handle load peaks, support you during vacation periods and in case of illness-related absences.
We are happy to assume the role of database administrator in critical staffing situations.
PostgreSQL® Migrations
Are you considering migrating an existing application from another database management system such as Oracle®, DB2®, Informix®, or MS SQL Server to PostgreSQL®?
We have been offering our customers migration support to PostgreSQL® from the beginning. We support many proprietary and legacy database systems. Our team has extensive experience. Additionally, our team has developed the credativ-pg-migrator, an open-source tool that can automate part of the migration. Furthermore, we work closely with our partner SplendidData, through which we have access to their commercial tool Cortex and our partner’s wealth of experience to specifically migrate Oracle® databases to PostgreSQL.
We support you at every step, from feasibility assessment and effort estimation through selection of the right tools and schema migration to fast and smooth data transfer for a switchover with the lowest possible downtime. Naturally, we also support you with migration from an on-premise environment to a future cloud environment, but also in the reverse direction, from the cloud environment back to an internal on-premise environment or to your own private cloud.
We employ experienced PostgreSQL® developers who support you with further development and troubleshooting in the database server.
Through access to the source code, errors and performance bottlenecks can be well localized; our experience helps you make PostgreSQL® even more reliable.
For PostgreSQL®, we also develop custom extensions and additional modules—naturally also under a free open-source license. We have therefore created a dedicated page for this topic: Migration to PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL® in the Cloud
Would you like to migrate your existing database to PostgreSQL® and operate it in a cloud environment?
credativ® supports the entire database life cycle for PostgreSQL® databases in typical cloud environments, such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS. We offer comprehensive consulting and services in all areas related to PostgreSQL® in enterprise environments. From initial planning to productive deployment, our dedicated PostgreSQL® team is available to you.
Elephant Shed – the Free PostgreSQL® Software Appliance from credativ
The PostgreSQL® Competence Center at credativ GmbH develops and maintains the freely available open-source project Elephant Shed. Elephant Shed is a powerful software appliance that provides a complete PostgreSQL® database environment including all tools useful and necessary for operation. This appliance can be deployed at any time as a ready-to-use database server. Elephant Shed is available for deployment on dedicated hardware as well as in virtualized environments. There are no costs for subscriptions or licenses. Further information about Elephant Shed is available here.
Training, Courses, and Workshops
Naturally, training, courses, and workshops are also part of the services offered by our PostgreSQL® Competence Center.
In addition to training and workshops tailored to your individual needs, we also offer standard training as remote events, at your location, or regularly at our site in Mönchengladbach. Through our many years of project and support experience with PostgreSQL®, and as an active part of the community, our PostgreSQL® experts can provide you with truly in-depth practical knowledge.
Further information about our PostgreSQL® training is available here.
Trademark Notice:
Oracle® is a trademark of Oracle Corp. DB2® and Informix® are trademarks of IBM Corp. Microsoft®, SQL Server®, and Hyper-V® are trademarks of Microsoft Corp. The use of the trademark names serves solely to identify the technological contexts within the scope of our services. credativ GmbH has no commercial relationship with the mentioned trademark owners.
Have we piqued your interest?
Our experts will be happy to answer your specific questions and support you in choosing the right open source solution for your project.
The credativ®
Open Source Support Center
Our answers to the most frequently asked questions: