Experts in Postgres and Open Source Infrastructure

Three weeks ago I was in Pasadena for SCALE 14. I had over 100 people in my room as I blistered the behind of PostgreSQL and how it handles backups. If you are interested in seeing my considered opinion I will also be training on the same topic at PgConf.US. I am also speaking on PostgreSQL Replication and finally, I was told that I am running the Lightning …

A lot of people probably don't know this but PostgreSQL does plan. It is true that we take all contributions and they are reviewed based on their merit but it is also true that the community tries very hard to have a road map of some sort. Those road maps are created by the more prolific contributors in the community.

In the past there was a yearly Developer Meeting. That …

It is really not fair to call it a mini-conf. The Scale 14x, PostgreSQL Day attendance was larger than every conference except PgConf.US (EDIT: in the United States/Canada). It is a great opportunity to integrate with a wider community that is diverse, technologically capable and at the front lines of production installations.

I spoke on Backups: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I had over 100 attendees in …

I am sitting in a glorious (although not the conference) hotel, writing this article. It is 13:58, at least it is where I am from, the great Pacific Northwest. I must admit, I miss the trees although I hear there are lots of them if you leave the city. What is there to say about this great city that the European community picked for their latest conference?

First and probably …

I spoke at the Whatcom PUG meeting last night on PostgreSQL 9.5. This is my fourth time giving this talk. The previous locations were DCPUG, PhillyPUG, and NYCPUG last month. The talk was well received and this was Whatcom PUG's best turn out yet! We even had an Open Street Map developer visit from Vancouver B.C.

The presentation does discuss some of the more popular features of 9.5, but as …

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 …

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 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 …

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 …

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. …