Postgres and Open Source Experts

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, …

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 …

Come on, admit it: you've always wanted to display the infomask bits from a tuple header in a human-readable manner, but you've never gotten around to it and you still keep htup.h in display while you peek around tuples.

Fortunately, that time is now past! Here's a short and simple recipe to decode the bits for your reading pleasure. Gone is the htup.h cheat sheet. Here's what you need:

create …

West is wrapped up. It was smaller. We split the attendees between Postgres Open and Surge. It was a good conference. We received a lot of positive feedback and I was even able to be nice (stop laughing, just ask others :P) to people for the conference.

We were able to fund two features for PostgreSQL, both of which will hopefully hit for 9.2. The first is work to …

PgWest is only a week a way folks, let's get those registrations in!

This year we have a diverse range of topics on PostgreSQL. Of course we have all the standard topics on backups, performance, mvcc but we also have some very interesting presentations coming from VMWare, Fusion-IO and Translattice.

• You can find the schedule here.
• Registration is open and is available here.

As we all know, PgWest is in San Jose this year in just under 3 weeks. The trainings are filling up fast and you will want to get your registrations in. We have great trainings on:

• Performance
• High Availability
• Administration
• Ruby on Rails (with PostgreSQL focus)
• Normalization
• DRBD

  These are filling up fast, so you will want to get your registration in.

We have another stellar year of content at PostgreSQL Conference West. The first round of talks has been reviewed and they are now published. There are some more talks on the way so stay tuned for the second round. We have also opened early registration, although we don't have the training options up yet. Take a look and watch for more official announcement style stuff soon.

Of note, Jim …

A while ago a gentlemen by the name of Josh (Abstrct) McDougall contacted me about a game he created and subsequent contest being held at DEFCON 19. What makes this so interesting is the majority of the game was created in PostgreSQL. This truly exposed the power of PostgreSQL and the ability to create business (or data) logic directly within the database instead of just using the database as a …

As I have posted in previous articles ( Fixing foreign key deadlocks and Part 2), I am working on reducing the lock strength required by foreign key checks. I have a working patch that solves a lot of the problems already; however it doesn't solve the one problem that I initially set to fix. It turned out to require a bit more rejiggering than I initially considered.

Note: this …