Postgres and Open Source Experts

If you are running any version of PostgreSQL 7.4, 8.0 or 8.1, it is now time to upgrade to 8.3 or 8.4. The versions 7.4 and 8.0 are slated for end of life at the end of this month. The 8.1 version is slated for end of life in November. This is not an item to take lightly. Once a version is end of life you will not be able …

I was on #postgresql today and someone asked an interesting question: (edited for readability)

I'm trying to write a constraint for a table. The constraint should check for unique-ness of two columns, one string and one boolean. However I have special logic, I can have only one row with a given string and true attribute. I can have multiple rows with the same string but with false attribute. For example, …

One of my favorite features of the upcoming PostgreSQL release is conditional triggers. With minimum efforts one can build per-column triggers by adding a column check into the triggering condition. This functionality is already available with Beta 2 of PostgreSQL 9.0. Alas, PostgreSQL doesn't backport features, in order to gain similar functionality in earlier releases you can use deny_updates.

The deny_updates project on PgFoundry contains PL/Perl and PL/PerlU functions …

On the 6th, I leave town, travelling again to an unknown land. A land of mystery, a land of great mobster movies and incredible picture opportunities. Of course, I speak of Chicago where I will be delivering a 5 day training on our illustrious database, PostgreSQL. After the 5 day training, I will be taking a short jaunt to South East Linux Fest where I will be speaking on PostgreSQL …

It's been a long time since we shipped the first version of Simpycity, a long time since we've really discussed how it works and how to get the most of it. Over the next couple of articles, I'm going to be discussing how we're using Simpycity internally, some ideas that we have going forward, and how you too can benefit. Since we're just shipping Simpycity 0.3 now, we should go …

I am an avid Ubuntu user. I like their philosophy. I like their code of conduct. I like what they are trying to do with Linux as a whole. I invite everyone to use Ubuntu. Unfortunately I have been unable to upgrade from Karmic. Why? Well, update-manager -d doesn't work because of some error with ubunut-minimal which (yes I researched it) was supposedly fixed, but it isn't. Yay!

I figured, …

Last week I delivered a PL/Perl talk at CodeCamp conference in Kyiv, Ukraine. The conference has been held at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, which is one of the top technical schools in Ukraine, so there were both really smart students and seasoned engineers. I talked about Perl inside PostgreSQL, deciding to highlight interesting features of PL/Perl with examples, hopefully covering most of them. Some of the attendees used PostgreSQL in production …

The great folks of Linux Fest Nortwest are hosting a PostgreSQL Track again this year. I will be speaking twice. First on what has ended up being a very popular utility, PITRTools. My second talk will be on Dumb Simple PostgreSQL Performance, which has been very popular with user groups. I look forward to seeing everyone again.

So PgEast is over. You wouldn't know it yet by looking at the website, but it is. We maxed out at ~ 160 people. That is an almost 2x increase over last year at East. It is also a significant increase over West last October. This is an exciting time for this conference series.

The trainings were also successful, I had 19 (of a max 20) show for my Performance …

I called the our hotel representative today because I was confused about why we had a deadline of 03/11 on the room discount. I was trying to push them to extend the date because we had met our room quota and I was wondering why they were trying to shut down the discount. Apparently, not only have we met our room quota, but the hotel is reaching capacity!

If you …