Postgres and Open Source Experts

• Main site.
  
• Call for papers

  Time line:

  May 25th: Talk submission opens
  July 31st: …

For those that are curious (and which for some reason don't follow the #pgcon tag at twitter), here's a picture of the attendees of Developer's Meeting.

Back row, from left to right: Robert Haas, Selena Deckelmann, Marko Kreen, KaiGai Kohei, Stephen Frost, Magnus Hagander , Robert Treat, Tom Lane, Heikki Linnakangas, Mark Wong, Josh Berkus, Kevin Grittner, Dimitri Fontaine, Koichi Suzuki, Andrew Dunstan, Fujii Masao, Jeff Davis, Greg Smith, Tatsuo …

The website is not quite updated yet …

Some time ago, a customer came to us with a strange vacuuming problem. Their regular vacuum job would die with a message such as this one:

vacuumdb: vacuuming of database "clint_app" failed:
  ERROR: failed to re-find parent key in index "work_items_pkey" for deletion target page 6100

Eventually, it turned out that their storage firmware had some glitch that caused things to go wrong in random ways, and corruption in various …

I got curious about a bloat problem on a customer's system today. The statistics as calculated by normal tools/queries say that one of the tables is 2x bloated. Another table is 6x bloated. And so on. For some reason I wanted to see what it looked like in a graphical way, so I threw together this simple query:

select s, coalesce(count, 0)
  from (select block, count(*)
          from (select split_part(tid, ',', …

I was speaking with an individual from 10Gen (#PgEast Gold Sponsor and creator …

One of our customers who is using Ruby on Rails with the PostgreSQL database backend notified us of a long-standing issue with the database driver: Lighthouse ticket #3721

The driver is doing something that at first glance looks like a smart thing, but apparently it's not that smart. What it does is it tries to detect the bit-string notation (binary vs. hexadecimal) based on the string content passed to it. …

It was rather puzzling to me why Redmine doesn't come with a Pastebin module and why there's no plugin for that.

One of the proposed "solutions" is to start a new wiki page, and put some <code> markup there. While this seems to work, it has some limitations a real pastebin component wouldn't suffer from. First thing that comes to mind is that you need a unique name to start …

Last week, a company's only PostgreSQL database server suffered an UPS failure. When they found they couldn't connect to it afterwards, they called Command Prompt to investigate.

The most important lesson to be learned here is: you need to make very sure you have backups. Even if the strategy is too simple, or even if they are taken only once a fortnight, they are going to save your neck …