2ndQuadrant
Eliminating Database Downtime

The database is the most important part of any IT infrastructure. “If a company happens to lose an application server, they might get another one, however losing a database is a significantly serious issue,” begins Simon Riggs, founder and CTO of 2ndQuadrant, explaining the vitality of database availability for any enterprise. To support this statement, Riggs lists out the vast array of modern businesses such as banks and telecom companies that have databases responsible for managing money and operations. Given the high availability requirements of these businesses, the greater emphasis is on ensuring consistent operability and good support of their systems. 2ndQuadrant supports enterprise usage of open source PostgreSQL for businesses like these by combining over two decades of expertise with their extensive, ongoing enterprise feature contributions made to the project in response to business demands. With a primary focus on large enterprises, 2ndQuadrant typically serves financial services such as banks, payment providers, and insurance companies, in addition to telecommunications and healthcare service providers.

In addition to providing world-renowned 24/7 production support, consulting, training, and remote DBA to its clients to preempt database downtime, 2ndQuadrant has been actively contributing to the open source Postgres community by writing new features. Over the past 18+ years, 2ndQuadrant has widely driven the growth and development of Postgres, earning the prestigious stature of being the ‘Major Sponsors of the Community.’ Riggs explains, “We have witnessed several companies expanding by drumming up investments from external sources; whereas, our idea of growth is by writing new features that are open source, and help Postgres thrive while adding value for our customers in the process.”

The flagship service provided by 2ndQuadrant is the Platinum Bug Fix Support. In a given scenario, if the customer’s database unexpectedly crashes down, presumably due to bugs that affect availability, 2ndQuadrant’s Platinum Support ensures that their database comes back up again by recovering the database quickly, and in many cases fixing the problems that occurred.

Reminiscing on a similar incident, Riggs shares a case study of one such client organization that was attacked by a bug within their core software causing deep corruption in the database, spreading the corruption to replication as well.

We have witnessed several companies expanding by drumming up investments from external sources; whereas, our idea of growth is by writing new features that are open source, and help Postgres thrive while adding value for our customers in the process

2ndQuadrant stepped in to neutralize the situation and contained the corruption with the help of their high availability technology. Over the course of the next week, the company kept their system up and running through various workarounds and successfully managed to identify and fix the corrupt data within their database.

Supporting a myriad of such complex database systems and platforms, 2ndQuadrant also specializes in Z platform from IBM— an excellent technology with exceptional CPU speed. The company took the platform’s capabilities up a notch and wrote special performance patches to make sure that the users get complete advantage of Z platform’s architecture. “Working with IBM has been a smooth experience where they have been very open in their approach of working with us. From providing access to their technology to making available the right people and expertise that fit our solution,” adds Riggs.

Currently, 2ndQuadrant is working on its latest multi-master replication technology for geographically distributed database called Postgres-BDR, which provides very high availability for PostgreSQL. The product enables the company to build a worldwide cluster base; all communicating together to provide high availability as well as access to data wherever it is needed.