September 18th: 5 TB of local storage added to Stats' modal compute server
Another 5 TB of local storage has been added to the modal server and users with larger data storage requirements are now being moved onto it but at the same time, their logical home directories will remain in the same places as before.
September 17th: new PostgreSQL database server launched
We have offered MySQL database services for several years, first on macomp00 and more recently on the dedicated mysql.ma server, which have been heavily used by joint projects with other departments. However, a project involving a large (approximately 115 GB) database containing text records averaging over 3 MB in length ran into problems in August, revealing a bug and a finite limitation in MySQL that Oracle, who now own the rights to MySQL, is aware of but not able to resolve at this stage.
This brought the project to a halt but the decision was then taken to install PostgreSQL version 9.6, an alternative and rather more 'heavyweight' database server, on this server alongside MySQL and migrate the large MySQL database to PostgreSQL. Although nowhere near as popular as MySQL, PostgreSQL does scale better and supports very long rows of around 1 gigabyte in length as well as huge databases. Following extensive testing, PostgreSQL facilities are now available for general use in the department, with the server also being known as 'pgsql.ma' and login and database accounts can be set up on request as for the MySQL accounts.