Open Source development has a lot going for it, as Bruce Momjian readily points out in a recent blog [1]. However, I believe he missed some key points that are positive for closed source development. Bruce asserts that with Open Source development the developers are the face of the software. That is true but certainly isn't always a good thing. There is a reason that the majority of software development, …
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Binding PostgreSQL server to specific CPU cores in Linux
Recently we had a customer who was running PostgreSQL 8.2 on a 32 cores system with 64GB of memory. They were deploying this server in addition to the already running one with 24 total cores and 32GB of memory. PostgreSQL configuration has been adjusted for extra resources, the database has been partitioned roughly in half between the 2 servers and the queries running against both servers were similar.
Suprisingly, when …
Migrating hierarchical queries from Oracle to PostgreSQL
This is the second part in a series of blog posts describing PostgreSQL analogs of common Oracle queries
One of the most intricate Oracle specific constructions is "START WITH ... CONNECT BY". According to Oracle's documentation, the syntax is: SELECT [query] [START WITH initial_condition] CONNECT BY [nocycle] condition. This statement is commonly used to traverse hierarchical data in the parent-child order. It's easier to illustrate how it works with …
Cool and Sexy: Open Source PostgreSQL enterprise contenders
As with any healthy project, there will be offshoots and people will take the source, fork it and try to create something new, better, different or just.... How that person feels it should be. This is a good thing, it leads to new ideas, new communities and sometimes truly interesting pieces of software.
Postgres-XC has been around for a while, it is primarily developed by NTT and EnterpriseDB. It has …
PgNext: Cancelled
It is with regret that I announce that PgNext is cancelled. I am not sure what is next for the PostgreSQL Conference series. The reasons are long and myriad and I will not bore you with them. However I will present the following video:
If you can't see the video, here is the video link.
If you can't see the video, here is the video link.
That video represents why I would put on the conferences. They were fun. We had …
Remembering our roots
Once upon a time, JD was a assistant manager for Block Buster video. This was a very long time ago and before a 23 month employment stint at Powells Books. It was at Powells that the world of computers was actually introduced to me as a viable employment option. While there I designed a special order database in DBase IV, was introduced to University Ingres, went through Book Buyer …
PgNext (PostgreSQL Conference) CFP is still open
As a reminder, the CFP for PgNext is still open. We are in Denver this year, let's make it rock! This year we are keeping it simple and getting back to roots. The conference is about community, networking with professionals, learning and in general having a good time. Who can't have a good time in Denver?
URI connection strings, PgNext CFP and other generalities (FKlocks)
Our team has been hard at work on several things. One is the URI patch for libpq which was just committed and sponsored by Heroku (Thanks Heroku). This is a novel patch that brings standard URI connection handling to libpq and any client/driver that decides to implement the functionality. You can see the patch here.
We are still actively working on PgNext: The Next PostgreSQL Conference. The folks on …
Pearls of Oracle to PostgreSQL conversion
We have been working on a large Oracle 8i conversion to PostgreSQL. Our customers were not concerned with the data conversion: there are tools like ora2pg and oracle foreign data wrapper to accomplish this. They do, however, have a significant number of queries that needs to be converted.
Apparently, most queries from Oracle and PostgreSQL look similar; after all, both are relational database systems, as opposed to Cassandra or MongoDB, …
Another day, another recovery
This is something I have seen many times now: a customer calls us because they lost some data and they want help recovering.
Now you must be wondering: surely if they lost data they can just recover from their last backup, right? Right — they had that. However we know that pg_dump takes a while to run and is stressful on the server, so it's normally run just once a …