I want to tell a story, and I’m sure most people won’t like it for one reason or another. If you stop reading after the first paragraph or two, I won’t blame you. It’s hard to read, and says a lot of bad things about humanity. But I like to think that it also provides necessary perspective that helps society see where it needs to improve.

It’s ( Read more... )

As many seasoned DBAs might know, there’s one area that PostgreSQL still manages to be highly aggravating. By this, I mean the role views have in mucking up PostgreSQL dependencies. The part that annoys me personally, is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Take, for example, what happens if you try to modify a VARCHAR column so that the column ( Read more... )

Before I really get going with this post, I want to say I’m not panicked, and I suggest you stay the same. Meanwhile, it’s pretty clear the currently cavalier attitude toward Ebola needs to change. And of course, it all boils down to humans being the fallible creatures they are.
How Ebola Works

There’s good information on How Ebola Works, and how ( Read more... )

Recently I stumbled across a question on Reddit regarding the performance impact of using pgBadger on an active database server. The only real answer to this question is: do not use pgBadger. Before anyone asks-no, you shouldn’t use pgFouine either. This is not an indictment on the quality of either project, but a statement of their obsolescence in ( Read more... )

Well, my publisher recently informed me that the book I’ve long been slaving over for almost a year, is finally finished. I must admit that PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook is somewhat awkward as a title, but that doesn’t detract from the contents. I’d like to discuss primarily why I wrote it.

When Packt first approached me in October of ( Read more... )

Programming is fun. I love programming! Ever since I changed my career from programming to database work, I’ve still occasionally dabbled in my former craft. As such, I believe I can say this with a fair amount of accuracy: programmers don’t understand databases. This isn’t something small, either; there’s a fundamental misunderstanding at play. ( Read more... )

When I heard about foreign tables using the new postgres_fdw foreign data wrapper in PostgreSQL 9.3, I was pretty excited. We hadn’t upgraded to 9.3 so I waited until we did before I did any serious testing. Having done more experimentation with it, I have to say I’m somewhat disappointed. Why? Because of how authentication was implemented.

I’m ( Read more... )

This May, I attended my first international conference: PGCon 2014. Though the schedule spanned from May 20th to May 23rd, I came primarily for the talks. Then there was the Unconference on the 24th. I’d never heard of such a thing, but it was billed as a good way to network and find out what community members want from PostgreSQL. After attending ( Read more... )

PostgreSQL is a pretty good database, and I enjoy working with it. However, there is an implementation detail that not everyone knows about, which can drastically affect table performance. What is this mysterious feature? I am, of course, referring to foreign keys.

Foreign keys are normally a part of good database design, and for good reason. They ( Read more... )

With the release of PostgreSQL 8.4, the community gained the ability to use CTE syntax. As such, this is a fairly old feature, yet it’s still misunderstood in a lot of ways. At the same time, the query planner has been advancing incrementally since that time. Most recently, PostgreSQL has gained the ability to perform index-only scans, making it ( Read more... )