Command Prompt, Inc.

Oracle 7.3 supports it!

That is how this all started. A gentleman tweeted about a Postgres limitation that Oracle has not had since at least since Oracle 7.3. 

The problem

As you can see in the tweet, Postgres by default will not defer a PRIMARY KEY check. Without the check being deferred the following will not work:

postgres=# select * from demo; 
 id  
---- 
  1 
  2 
(2 rows)
postgres=# alter table demo add primary key(id);   
ALTER TABLE 
postgres=# begin; 
BEGIN 
postgres=# update demo set id=id-1; 
UPDATE 2 
postgres=# update demo set id=id+1; 
ERROR:  duplicate key value violates unique constraint "demo_pkey" 
DETAIL:  Key (id)=(1) already exists.

  The solution

The solution, as mentioned ...

For most workloads the Postgres Autovacuum daemon works just fine. You go about your day with 3 workers that wake up once a minute to make sure that everything is nice and tidy. If things are dirty enough (around 10%) then one of the workers gets in gear and cleans things up. Unfortunately, if you have an inverted load from the norm, Autovacuum may not be able to keep up and you will suffer increased fragmentation and bloat.

The norm

The most common workload for Postgres (especially web based apps) includes many reads and some writes. It is usually somewhere around 75-95% reads and 5-25% writes. Assuming an average database, Autovacuum will keep up just fine and with tuning will ...

A recent poll was conducted @amplifypostgres to determine where the Postgres community should have its interactive communication. Options included were Google Hangouts, Slack, Reddit or “Other”.

The results were not surprising, with Google Hangouts beating Slack with 157 votes cast. There were also notable mentions of IRC, and Gitter. A couple of long time Postgresql.Org members asked the inevitable, “What is wrong with IRC?” Of course there is nothing wrong with IRC but when you tell many community users to use IRC, the most common response is “IRWhat?” which is either a sign of disdain or ignorance depending on the user.

The problem and what is driving this post was an additional comment made by a long time community ...

You may ask yourself, how did I get here?

The journey to this place in my professional career as the newly hired Director of Business Development for Command Prompt, Inc. is a long and winding one, and so i'd like to share a couple of stories to enlighten curious folks:

“Why Postgres?!”

Last September the fledgling consulting firm that I was handling sales and business development for was shuttering, and my best bud and business colleague Jim Nasby and I were on the market for job opportunities. Word had gotten out, and I had an introductory call with a potential employer. An advantage of my former position at Blue Treble was the ability to engage regularly in the ...

You should always be careful of what you ask for. A couple of months ago while I was feeling particularly brave, I submitted to present at the DataLayer Conference. The next thing I knew, I was speaking at the DataLayer Conference. The conference takes place in Austin on May 17th. Conferences like this one are an awesome channel for PostgreSQL advocacy. Of course I am partial to PgConf US but a conference such as DataLayer allows us to reach people who may be using one of those "other" databases. 

Here is the synopsis of the presentation I will be giving:

PostgreSQL: The Center of Your Data Universe

Although there are still battles to be fought, the war has already ...

We use Redmine here at CMD for all our project management needs. In fact, this Open Source solution is at the heart of our day-to-day operations. Over the time, we have made a number of contiributions to the project and extended, or modified, Redmine's behavior to suit our needs.

For example, one of the things we did was integrate Zabbix-based PostgreSQL monitoring system with Redmine. This allows us to keep track of all monitoring alerts in a centrally managed place, turn them into actionable tickets when necessary, discuss and work out specific problems either internally or with a customer.

Per our SLA, we're often expected to respond in a swift fashion to emergencies that do occur from time to time ...

Last week I spoke at the Bellingham Young Professional Group on starting and running a business. It was a well attended presentation. I was nervous at first because although I do a lot of public speaking, I usually speak to technical people. This was a wholly different crowd and I was pulling from a different set of expertise. The crowd was largely under 30 and wanting to start a business of some sort. The presentation went over well and by far the most common feedback was, "I didn't even consider that, thank you". It is a good feeling to know you are helping people.

Indirect Advocacy: not directly caused by a recommendation of a particular cause

By stepping out ...

Below is the video of the webinar I did recently on PostgreSQL and Oracle. This webinar went very well. This is the first time I had ever performed a webinar that I recall. It was an interesting experience.  

PostgreSQL for Oracle Developers and DBA's

 

If you would like more information on this topic or any other topic surrounding PostgreSQL and Open Source, don't hesitate to contact us.

There is a nice lie out there. A lot of people want to believe it. They think by believing this lie it will somehow increase something for them. In some ways that is true. If you want what you are doing to be about you. If you are a believer in Open Source, it isn't about you. It is about the community and bettering that community as a whole.

If we provide the videos of our sessions for free, you won't attend the conference.

The PgConf US conference grows every year and guess what, they provide their videos for free.

If you pay for the conference, we will provide the videos for free.

LinuxFest Northwest which is larger ...

From the title, that is the question. This is the last week of the PgConf US 2017 CFP (you can submit here: http://www.pgconf.us/2017/submit/) and I have no idea what to submit.

I am blessed that my talks are very well attended, the audience is engaged and we all have a good time. Many times laughing at me because I have a hard time staying on one specific topic (especially if someone brings a kid into the room). There is the disclaimer I have to put up on my slides because there are some in the community that can't handle humor or PG-13 content but we must all love our neighbor and enjoy them ...

Install LAPP in Containers
(Linux Containers and Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP)

In this blog post I will detail how to install Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL in Linux containers on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

It can be desirable to isolate certain software from the rest of a system for a variety of reasons. These reasons can range, but one of the most common is security. There are a multitude of methods for isolation ranging from process sandboxing to full hardware virtualization. Regarding the former, we have a tool called chroot.

Change root, or chroot for short, has been a UNIX utility for “sandboxing” processes since 1982. Sandboxing is a general term to describe the act of executing processes outside of the root ...

The snap packages for 9.3.15, 9.4.10, 9.5.5 and 9.6.1 are now available. To install them:

sudo snap install postgresql$version

Where $version is one of 93, 94, 95 or 96.

The snap packages for PostgreSQL are a community project being lead by Command Prompt. You can visit the repo at github.

To learn more about snap packages please visit the Ubuntu snapcraft developer FAQ.

A #postgresql user today asked:

noob question - trying to write a Dockerfile that runs postgres... how do I get the effect of a non-interactive `service postgresql initdb` call?

  While several other community members provided the truthful but not helpful answer of, "Just throw Docker in the Trash", I worked out the following hack/trick/snipe hunt. The answer is, you can't. You have to call initdb directly. This took a few tries because PostgreSQL does not ship -q (quiet) flag with initdb. It will always make noise even when you don't want it to. However, if you call initdb directly, pass a few flags that have nothing to do with actually being quiet and redirect STDERR then ...

Anyone who uses PostgreSQL knows of the best client available: psql. This is the client that ships with PostgreSQL. Yes it is a command line client (which turns some people off) but that also means that it is the most efficient at everyday tasks for a DBA. What a lot of people don't know is that psql is rather configurable. Here is an example:

Problem 1: I want my history file in a place other that ~/.psql_history

Problem 2: I want my history file to be per database not global

Solution 1: Edit the .psqlrc file and change the history file settings

\set HISTFILE ~/psql_history/.psql_history

This will put your .psql_history file into the directory psql_history under your home ...

This is a test table from an Oracle to Postgres migration. The table has had a dozen or so columns removed for the illustration of this test case. I did not design this table but the customer is fixing it (adding proper primary key, changing to boolean and integer where appropriate etc...).

Table "public.costcenter"

       Column       |            Type             |     Modifiers
-------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------
  costcenterid      | numeric                     | not null
  costcenterno      | character varying(100)      | not null
  amount            | numeric(18,2)               |
  closed            | boolean                     | not null
  enteruser         | integer                     |
  phonelines        | numeric                     |
  cckeyid           | character varying(100)      |
  country           | character varying(2)        |
  level4            | character varying(100)      |
  level5            | character varying(100)      |
  level6            | character varying(100)      |
  level7            | character varying(100)      |
  level8            | character varying(100)      |
  level9            | character varying(100)      |
  latitude          | character varying(20)       |
  longitude         | character varying(20 ...

I have updated my Rich in the Jungle presentation with new pricing for AWS vs. Softlayer. Things haven't changed much, in terms of raw performance per dollar (which is not the only qualifier). Softlayer is clearly the winner.

Once upon a time FOSS was about Freedom. It was about exposing equality within source code. It allowed everyone equal rights and equal access to the technology they were using. An idea that if you were capable, you could fix code or pay someone to fix code. An ideology that there was something greater than yourself and that there was an inherent right built into what it is to be human with software.

Leaders to lemmings

I sat in a bar slowly nursing beers with other community members over a period of hours. We spoke of many things. We spoke of the never-done new PostgreSQL website. We spoke of my distaste for Amazon Web Services since reformed, with the exception ...

If your PostgreSQL instance is running on an Ubuntu LTS system that you need to upgrade to the most recent release, say from precise to trusty – because, well, sooner or later you must – you need to consider what is going to happen to your database.

Note
The upgrade process described in this article is similar to what you would have to do if you were upgrading from Trusty to Xenial, the newest Ubuntu LTS release.

Ubuntu attempts to make the process of upgrading to the newest distribution release easy and hassle-free. In fact, it is the case in many situations but not when there is PostgreSQL running in the system. If you just go ahead and try to run ...

As the PostgreSQL community continues down its path of world domination I can't help but wonder whether the various PostgreSQL companies are going to survive the changes. Once upon a time there was an undercurrent of understanding that what was good for the community was good for the company. Whatever company that may be. However, over the last few years it seems that has changed. It seems there is more prevalance toward: What is good for the company is good for the community, or in other words, "The goal is profit."

That is a flawed discipline to follow in the Open Source world. A truly beneficial, strong and diverse community has to eliminate that thought entirely. The goal is ...

What Simpycity Is

Simpycity is an object-relational mapper. It seamlessly maps PostgreSQL query
and function result sets to Python classes and class attributes.

It allows for the easy and rapid development of query- and
stored procedure-based data representations. Simpycity leverages PostgreSQL's
powerful composite type system, and the advanced type handling of the psycopg2
database access library.

What Simpycity is Not

Simpycity is not a SQL generator and does not attempt to abstract or hide SQL.
Simpycity is designed for developers who deeply understand SQL and
desire to write the best possible SQL representations for their database.
Simpycity also rejects the Active Record paradigm, whose simplistic patterns
fail in even moderately complex systems.

Core Philosophy

The core philosophy behind Simpycity ...

My slides from my presentation and PgConf.US 2016:

 

The PostgreSQL community has a lot of conferences in the United States:

• PgUS United States PostgreSQL Conference 
• Citus Data PgConfSV
• PgUS SCALE PgDay (which as of 2016 is really a conference within a conference)
• PostgresOpen
• EDB PostgresVision

And that doesn't come even close to the number of various conferences in Europe.

As Bruce Momjian pointed out in his excellent blog this is a good thing. It is true that in the United States there is the big boy on the block and it will likely hit 600 people in 2017 but other than that the conferences are all small and regional. The exception is PostgresVision which hasn't yet run and therefore we don't know how many people ...

I attended the fantastically presented PgConf US 2016 last week. An amazing conference, my training was well attended, my talk was at capacity, the 20th Anniversary Party was phenomenal and the conference raised money for an excellent cause. There were over 435 attendees, giving our brothers and sisters at PgConf EU something to work for during their conference in November.

While attending the hallway track, I was talking to a gentleman whose name escapes me. He asked me how he could contribute to the community. I am always excited to have that conversation because we are able to discuss all kinds of different ways to contribute, whether it be social (user groups, pgday, speaking at alternative conferences), documentation, code, or ...

Three weeks ago I was in Pasadena for SCALE 14. I had over 100 people in my room as I blistered the behind of PostgreSQL and how it handles backups. If you are interested in seeing my considered opinion I will also be training on the same topic at PgConf.US. I am also speaking on PostgreSQL Replication and finally, I was told that I am running the Lightning Talks. I have never coordinated something like Lightning Talks before. It should be an interesting experience.

If that wasn't enough news, I have more! The Ruby community has adopted the draft PostgreSQL Code of Conduct. As one of the primary authors of that document, I am honored to have such ...

A lot of people probably don't know this but PostgreSQL does plan. It is true that we take all contributions and they are reviewed based on their merit but it is also true that the community tries very hard to have a road map of some sort. Those road maps are created by the more prolific contributors in the community.

In the past there was a yearly Developer Meeting. That meeting would take place at PgCon. PgCon is held in May at the University of Ottawa, Canada. It is a small but great developer conference.

This year we are going to have two plus probably an informal one for a total of three. The first of which is taking ...