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East 09: Call for papers!

PostgreSQL Conference, U.S., East 09 will be held in Philadelphia at historic Drexel University from April 3rd through 5th. The call for papers is now out.

As always we let our submissions define our actual tracks. If you have something you want to talk about it. Submit it. As long as it is about PostgreSQL (or doing something with PostgreSQL) we will consider it.

We are seeking creative ideas about …

Simpycity: A Quick Tutorial

Using Simpycity is as easy as its name suggests - quick, easy. Simple. In keeping with that philosophy, Simpycity offers 3 constructs for database access: Function, Query, and Raw. At a glance, each name describes the type of access it offers: Function providing access through stored procedures, Query constructing a simple SQL query from your arguments, and Raw, which allows you to write your own SQL query directly. We will …

Simple PostgreSQL Database Mapping

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, …

FK, CHECK, ENUM or DOMAIN. That is the question.

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 …

Replicator meeting log for 01-08-09 is up

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.

PostgreSQL Conference / PgCon.US update

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 …

PITRTools: Multiple slave support

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 all it …

PostgreSQL Replicator Update 01.06.09

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 …

PostgreSQL Conference: West 2007, More video up

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

PgDay LFNW: Call for Papers! (04/25/09)

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 …