Postgres and Open Source Experts

When I began at Command Prompt, Java was coffee, Python was a snake, and a Ruby was best used on the color of glittery slippers. If you would have asked me two and a half years ago what "PostgreSQL" does, I would have asked you what language you were speaking.

A year later, I took my first sales call with out Joshua Drake (jd, @linuxhiker). I was shaking in my …

pg_basebackup was introduced in Postgres 9.1 as a simple way to copy the data directory of a running database cluster. This was a great addition to a small group of PostgreSQL Client Applications.

The pg_basebackup approach differs from the standard pg_start_backup(), rsync (or other file system copy), pg_stop_backup() approach in that it uses the replication protocol over a standard Postgres connection to make the base backup. A few highlights: …

In August I spoke at NYCPUG on Dumb Simple PostgreSQL Performance. The talk was well accepted and there was about 60 people in attendance. I have always enjoyed my trips to NYC but this is the first time I have taken a leisurely look at the city. I found myself enjoying a water front walk from 42nd, through the Highline, to Battery Park, all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge …

We do quite a bit of work for King County Library systems. The library system has 45 branches and runs the Open Source Evergreen ILS. One of the very smart things that the Evergreen project decided was that their database of choice would be PostgreSQL. One of the things that the Evergreen project is not good at is supporting LTS releases of Linux and therefore certain things can be a …

We are all human. We all lose our temper. We all have our moments of, "I really wish I could take that back". Of course not if you are not Linus Torvalds. Now everyone knows that Linus has a temper, that he is a foul mouth, lacks certain social graces and is generally one of the, if not the most important developers to surface in the last 20 years. Does …

We have backported the postgres_fdw to 9.2. It is read only of course as the infrastructure for writes is not in 9.2 but it is usable. Enjoy it!

• Postgres-FDW

I don't know if it is a mainline kernel problem but I can tell you that on Ubuntu Precise, Linux kernel 3.2 is a disaster for PostgreSQL. I am not even going to go into a huge rant about it. I am just posting the numbers. See for yourself. There should be a public service announcement about it.

before upgrade to 3.9

08:35:01 AM     CPU     %user     %nice   %system   %iowait    %steal …

My blog on changes to the wire protocol [1] prompted this question from a reader:

"Would it be necessary to modify the wire protocol to support multiple query/result-set combinations per server round-trip? That is, to be able to send a hundred different queries (each with a different number and type of columns in the result set) and receive a hundred different results all in a single network round-trip? That is …

A recent discussion on the lists about potentially incompatible changes to 9.4/10.0 of PostgreSQL the idea of things we wanted to do to the wire protocol in upcoming releases.

The wire protocol is the language spoken between a client and the server of postgresql. The majority of programming languages out there do not implement their own version of the protocol instead opting to bind to the C library libpq. There …

We quietly released PITRTool 1.3 last week. This version has been in development for a long time and over the past 6 months became a priority to complete. There is one known minor issue that may or may not be fixed as it doesn't affect production usage in a meaningful way. Release 1.3 contiues to support all the way back to 8.2 with warm standby but we also now support …