Postgres and Open Source Experts

With everyone and their mothers trying to build the next awesome website and next amazing web service, you'll probably find that SQL databases are getting more and more popular. As it turns out though, writing complex software on databases is harder than it looks.

Hard enough that database abstractions are growing in popularity, pushing "database agnosticism" and turning the database into a dumb, interchangable data store. As a database developer, …

We have a customer that recently asked me to comment on which I would use for a particular problem. This is a simple validating lookup. For example, CHECK(VALUE IN ('foo','bar')). Should we use a CHECK constraint, FK, ENUM or DOMAIN?

A CHECK constraint is easy to apply and has simple syntax. It is also extremely flexible in solving other types of validating problems. If your valid values change you must …

The PostgreSQL + Replicator meeting logs for 01-08-09 are up. This was a long meeting held on #replicator using the Freenode IRC service. Topics covered were the removal of the Single Point of Failure of the MCP which is partially done. The new in the PostgreSQL backend forwarder works but now the question is how to safely handle failover. Take a look, maybe you have an idea.

In an attempt to ensure the continued positive growth of the community, PostgreSQL Conference, U.S. is going to change its current policy toward the domain PgCon.US. The current policy is that the domain would only be used in lieu of http://www.postgresqlconference.org/ when space was significantly to display the long URL was significantly limited. The new policy will be that PgCon.US will not be used. I would encourage any and all …

I gave a lightning talk at Pg Conference: West 08 about a tool that I have developed call PITRTools. PITRTools is a python based log shipping utility. Essentially it wraps itself around standard tools such as rsync, and pg_standby to provide a usable experience. Some of the features is provides are:

• Auto initialization of environment
• Simple base backups
• Monitoring of Master
• Arbitrary alerts
• Failover
• Failover actions
• etc...

In …

I know it appears that it has been pretty quiet since we open sourced Replicator but that isn't the case. We have been actively working on 1.9 and fixing 1.8 Beta as bug reports have come in, including a bug to sequence replication. However, 1.9 is the true milestone release where we have finally moved away from the original architecture. For those that don't know, the original architecture looked like …

I have gotten a couple more of the West 2007 Videos.

• PostgreSQL Partitioning - Robert Treat
• Babel of PLs - David Fetter

PostgreSQL Conference, U.S. is having a PgDay at LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham Washington on April 25th, 2009. The PgDay (and LinuxFest Northwest) is a free event. We are holding the PgDAY on the first day of the event (a Saturday) parallel with LFNW. There was over 700 attendees to LFNW last year. LFNW is hoping for even more this year! In short, we are looking for some PostgreSQL talks (45 …

As I was working on PostgreSQL Conference this weekend I happen to crawl under my desk to pick up a pin I dropped. As I was crawling back out I smacked my head on the top of the desk and in the process jostled an empty (black) computer case that was sitting there. I noticed something on top of the case so I took a long hard look and behold! …

I have closed the survey, "When to hold it" and provided the results. Of particular interest to me was the majority wanted Late March/Early April but a significant amount were also interested in having the conference in Early June. I am also glad to see that people were not interested in conflicting with Ottawa as I hear it is a very good conference.