Spacewalk 1.2 released -> PostgreSQL Support quite ready -> First analysis

Today, Spacewalk – the upstream project of the RHN satellite – released version 1.2. One of the promises the developers made was better support of PostgreSQL. It seems that lot of stuff is now working. As I promised, I’m going to examine whats working and whats not. I’ll file every single bug I’ll find, please do the same in a polite manner.

First impression
Installation and first sync of yum channels works like PostgreSQL support was there from the first second. Nevertheless, there is still a lot to test.

How to install Spacewalk with PostgreSQL?
It is straight forward:

• Set up a PostgreSQL database as described here
• Follow and exclude things that mentions Oracle
• Go for the the instructions about PostgreSQL.

And enjoy your newly installed Spacewalk server w/o Oracle!

What I proofed working so far:

• Installing with PostgreSQL went smooth and much faster than the stuff with an Oracle setup
• Creating a CentOS5 Channel
• Add a yum repository (i.e.mirror.switch.ch)
• Linking the yum repo to a channel

Conclusion so far

• Spacewalk feels (not measured) MUCH (very much) faster with PostgreSQL. (Feels like more than the tripple speed)
• PostgreSQL support seems to be almost ready for production (the tested stuff)
• As RHN Satellite 5.4 is out now and the ISS bug is fixed (in spacewalk-nightly, not yet with an erratum) Red Hat should and can now focus on the complete replacement of the Oracle embedded DB.
• RHN Satellite 6.0 can and should be released w/o being bound to Oracle

More things to test

Since syncing repos is a time consuming task (seems to be much less time consuming with PostgreSQL), some tests are still pending. There is no single System yet subscribed, no deployment tests etc. I’ll test them later and let you know.

Some more words to say

The RHN Satellite and Spacewalk developer crew (once again) made an outstanding good job (I wish I could say the same on QA). At FUDCon 2010 in Zurich, Miroslav stated that nobody is willing to test the PostgreSQL support. No wonder it was not yet ready to test it at that time. Now, PostgreSQL enabled Spacewalk is ready for being tested by broad public , do it as I do it!

Having fun? Yes sure, I’m going to do some more intensive tests on the PostgreSQL support.

Cheers,

Luc