Postgres and Open Source Experts

We've been a bit quiet on the postgres.js front lately, but there's a couple of exciting new announcements that we'd like to go over with Postgres.js Firstly, we've plugged in LISTEN/NOTIFY support. This is huge, as it allows you to register asynchronous callbacks based on events from Postgres, outside of any transactional context. Additionally, as of PG 9.0, NOTIFY messages from the Postgres server can contain an arbitrary text payload. …

Or, two great tastes that work together. PostgreSQL Conference West was last week, and we will be looking at East 2011 in a few short months. I was fortunate enough to present a paper on Postgres.js, the driver I've been working on for Node.js for the past several months. I had a lot of great feedback in my talk, a lot of great questions, and even some immediate bug reports. …

So as you all know, we've been working on postgres support for the up-and-coming node.js environment, and we just got a great new example of Postgres' functionality that we're proud to say we support - specifically, the query format INSERT..RETURNING. For those unfamiliar with INSERT..RETURNING, this type of query allows us to do just what it says - return a value, or set of values, after an INSERT statement. This …

Following up on our brand-new Simpycity 0.3.1 release from earlier today, you're now able to get hold of Simpycity via the ever-popular code-sharing platform GitHub. Check us out @ GitHub, and track all the Command Prompt projects!

Following up on the blog post covering the new coolness in 0.3, and better docs on working with Simpycity, we've just released Simpycity 0.3.1, our best release yet! Simpycity can be downloaded from our Wiki, and our code is available from the Subversion repository. Finally, starting today, all new releases of Simpycity are available on the PyPI package index, and Simpycity installable via:

$ easy_install Simpycity

Simpycity is, as we've previously covered, a small library that permits for the direct mapping of arbitrary SQL statements to Python callables. This power allows for the development of complex representations that do not need to directly map to the underlying database representation. This differs from most conventional ORM technology, which follows the ActiveRecord pattern. Simpycity was implemented in this way for a great many reasons, first and foremost that …

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 …

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 …

While working on a Simpycity + Pylons environment the other day, I noticed that my app was leaking Postgres connection handles. This is not behaviour you ever want to see, especially in software as vital as Simpycity. Investigation and testing demonstrated pretty conclusively here, and here that the Python garbage collector was not immediately cleaning up dead/unreferenced objects. Specifically, in the test case below,

 def foo():
      r = Raw("SELECT count(*) …

Project Design Simpycity's core philosophy is that the DBA is going to perform the vast majority of the schema design without the aid of a conventional ORM. This is a marked divergence from most other ORMs and database abstraction layers, and it has an impact on how your project should be designed. The best results with Simpycity will be seen with a strong up-front requirements analysis, thorough schema design, and …