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Tip for West side U.S. folks going to PgConf.EU in October

This tip works very well for me because of my physical location (Bellingham, WA) but it would also work reasonably well for anyone flying from Denver->West Coast including places such as Houston. It does take a little bit of patience though.

A normal trip for myself would mean driving down to SEA which is 90 minutes to 2 hours. This year, I decided on whim to see what it …

Elevating your confidence with the Elephant's restoration capabilities

In the beginning

There was Unix, Linux and Windows. They all run on hardware and that hardware all has bugs. What is the best way to work around hardware bugs? Backups.

You haven't had bad hardware, only bad developers? That's o.k., we have a solution to them too. It is called backups.

You haven't had bad hardware or bad developers, just bosses who still demand to have direct access to …

A new user discovers the PostgreSQL public schema

A new user of PostgreSQL recently discovered that PostgreSQL allows any PostgreSQL user to create objects and data by default.[1] I know you are saying, "What... PostgreSQL has some of the most advanced and flexible security in the industry!" and you are absolutely correct, we do. However, once you can connect to PostgreSQL, you have some interesting default capabilities. Consider the following example:

postgres@sqitch:/# psql -U postgres
psql (9.2.11)
Type …

Let's delete contrib!

There has been a lot of discussion about the upcoming extension pg_audit and whether or not it should be in contrib. You can read about that here. The end result of the discussion is that pg_audit is going to be reverted and not in contrib. There were plenty of technical reasons why people didn't want it in contrib but I have a different reason. It is an extension. It doesn't …

Updating the .Org docs on backups

I spent a great deal of time working through the SQL DUMP portion of the 9.5devel docs this past week. Below is the current text of what I have and it would be great if my readers would take a look and offer some thoughtful feedback. What would you like to see added? What would you like to see changed? Please note that this is reference documentation not tutorial documentation. …

WhatcomPUG meeting on 04/21. Start date, end date, calculate

The PUG meeting was good. We now have a consistent if small group that are attending. Before the presentation we spoke about possibly moving the group to meetup to get a little better visibility. G+ Communities are awesome but Meetup seems to be where the people in the area look.

The presentation was provided by Eric Worden who happens to be a CMD employee. The talk overall is very good …

Reflections on PgConf.US 2015

Saturday the 18th of April, I woke up to the following:
 

It was one of those moments that you realize just how blessed of a life you have. A moment where you stop and realize that you must have done something right, at least once. I was with my all of my ladies, there were no other people at the camp site, the weather was clear and it was …

WhatcomPUG meeting last night on: sqitch and... bitcoin friends were made!


Last night I attended the second WhatcomPUG. This meeting was about Sqitch, a interesting database revision control mechanism. The system is written in Perl and was developed by David Wheeler of PgTap fame. It looks and feels like git. As it is written in Perl it definitely has too many options. That said, what we were shown works, works well and appears to be a solid and thorough …

Stomping to PgConf.US: Webscale is Dead; PostgreSQL is King! A challenge, do you accept?

I submitted to PgConf.US. I submitted talks from my general pool. All of them have been recently updated. They are also all solid talks that have been well received in the past. I thought I would end up giving my, "Practical PostgreSQL Performance: AWS Edition" talk. It is a good talk, is relevant to today and the community knows of my elevated opinion of using AWS with PostgreSQL (there …

PostgreSQL is King! Last week was quite busy being a servant.

Last week was one of the busiest community weeks I have had in a long time. It started with an excellent time in Vancouver, B.C. giving my presentation, "An evening with PostgreSQL!" at VanLUG. These are a great group of people. They took all my jibes with good humor (Canadians gave us Maple Syrup, we gave them Fox News) and we enjoyed not only technical discussion but discussions on technology …