Postgres and Open Source Experts

Recently, I was able to attend the local PostgreSQL community meeting here in Portland, and the topic du jour was covering the nifty and interesting features that are found in PG 9.0. Confessing that I haven't really been paying close attention to what's new in 9.0, the talk was incredibly interesting - covering a range of new features in 9.0.The ones I'm really excited about are: /contrib/passwordcheck This newly-added contrib …

PostgreSQL is widely accepted as the most scalable and stable Open Source database in the industry. It is also known to hold its own against any of the proprietary databases as well. There are a plethora of High Availability options available for every workload and business requirement. Below is a brief listing of the common High Availability options for PostgreSQL. This is by no means an exhaustive list but it …

I am not writing this to jump all over Big Jim's post but after reading it and seeing the syntax of Scala (and Java), I can't help but wonder, why anyone would use either language (based on syntax). Yes I know it is a matter of taste and everyone has an opinion. Let's just say my taste lean toward more succinct code.

#!/usr/bin/python
#
# Set up initial work
# …

If you are running any version of PostgreSQL 7.4, 8.0 or 8.1, it is now time to upgrade to 8.3 or 8.4. The versions 7.4 and 8.0 are slated for end of life at the end of this month. The 8.1 version is slated for end of life in November. This is not an item to take lightly. Once a version is end of life you will not be able …

I was on #postgresql today and someone asked an interesting question: (edited for readability)

I'm trying to write a constraint for a table. The constraint should check for unique-ness of two columns, one string and one boolean. However I have special logic, I can have only one row with a given string and true attribute. I can have multiple rows with the same string but with false attribute. For example, …

One of my favorite features of the upcoming PostgreSQL release is conditional triggers. With minimum efforts one can build per-column triggers by adding a column check into the triggering condition. This functionality is already available with Beta 2 of PostgreSQL 9.0. Alas, PostgreSQL doesn't backport features, in order to gain similar functionality in earlier releases you can use deny_updates.

The deny_updates project on PgFoundry contains PL/Perl and PL/PerlU functions …

On the 6th, I leave town, travelling again to an unknown land. A land of mystery, a land of great mobster movies and incredible picture opportunities. Of course, I speak of Chicago where I will be delivering a 5 day training on our illustrious database, PostgreSQL. After the 5 day training, I will be taking a short jaunt to South East Linux Fest where I will be speaking on PostgreSQL …

It's been a long time since we shipped the first version of Simpycity, a long time since we've really discussed how it works and how to get the most of it. Over the next couple of articles, I'm going to be discussing how we're using Simpycity internally, some ideas that we have going forward, and how you too can benefit. Since we're just shipping Simpycity 0.3 now, we should go …

I am an avid Ubuntu user. I like their philosophy. I like their code of conduct. I like what they are trying to do with Linux as a whole. I invite everyone to use Ubuntu. Unfortunately I have been unable to upgrade from Karmic. Why? Well, update-manager -d doesn't work because of some error with ubunut-minimal which (yes I researched it) was supposedly fixed, but it isn't. Yay!

I figured, …

Last week I delivered a PL/Perl talk at CodeCamp conference in Kyiv, Ukraine. The conference has been held at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, which is one of the top technical schools in Ukraine, so there were both really smart students and seasoned engineers. I talked about Perl inside PostgreSQL, deciding to highlight interesting features of PL/Perl with examples, hopefully covering most of them. Some of the attendees used PostgreSQL in production …