Customize your AlloyDB Omni installation

Single-server

Mount an external data directory

By default, the command in the Quickstart: Install AlloyDB Omni stores the database data in an area managed by Docker. This is convenient for getting started but makes it difficult to find and use the data directory. Instead, you can set up a bind mount to map the data directory to a known location on your disk.

docker run --name CONTAINER_NAME \
-e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=NEW_PASSWORD \
-v DATA_DIR:/var/lib/postgresql/data \
-p HOST_PORT:5432 -d google/alloydbomni

Replace the following:

• CONTAINER_NAME: The name to assign this new AlloyDB Omni container in your host machine's container registry—for example, my-omni.

• NEW_PASSWORD: The password assigned the new container's postgres user after its creation.

• DATA_DIR: The file system path that you want AlloyDB Omni to use for its data directory.

• HOST_PORT: The TCP port on the host machine that the container should publish its own port 5432 to. To use the PostgreSQL default port on the host machine as well, specify 5432.

Enable ulimits

The ulimit parameters specify various process limits that the Docker container is allowed to use. For optimal performance, AlloyDB Omni adjusts process priorities to allow critical PostgreSQL processes to run with higher priority, that is they get a bigger allocation of available CPUs. To allow this, specify -20:-20, which removes limitations for the AlloyDB Omni container.

docker run --name CONTAINER_NAME \
-e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=NEW_PASSWORD \
--ulimit=nice=-20:-20 \
-p HOST_PORT:5432 -d google/alloydbomni

Specify a logging driver

By default, Docker does not perform log rotations. This can use up a lot of disk space, and eventually lead to disk space exhaustion. You can configure Docker to use a different logging driver. For example, to log to journald:

docker run --name CONTAINER_NAME \
-e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=NEW_PASSWORD \
--log-driver=journald \
-p HOST_PORT:5432 -d google/alloydbomni

For more information about Docker and logging drivers, refer to Docker's documentation Configure logging drivers.

You can also configure logging using PostgreSQL. For more information, refer to PostgreSQL documentation Error reporting and logging.

Mount a shared memory volume

If you plan to use the AlloyDB columnar engine with AlloyDB Omni, we recommend making shared memory available to the AlloyDB Omni container. The method for doing this differs depending upon your host operating system, as shown in the following examples.

   docker run --name CONTAINER_NAME \
     -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=NEW_PASSWORD \
     -p HOST_PORT:5432 \
     -v /dev/shm:/dev/shm \
     -d google/alloydbomni

 docker run --name CONTAINER_NAME \
    -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=NEW_PASSWORD \
    -p HOST_PORT:5432 \
    --shm-size=SHARED_MEMORY_SIZE \
    -d google/alloydbomni