..::Planet PostgreSQL::..

One of the most important feedback I got about the presentation of pgstaging were the lack of pictures, something like a bird-view of how you operate it. Well, thanks to ditaa and Emacs picture-mode here it is:

Hope you enjoy, it should not be necessary to comment much if I got to the point!

Of course I commited the text source file to the Git repository. The only problem I ran into is that ditaa defaults to ouputing a quite big right margin containing only white pixels, and that didn't fit well, visually, in this blog. So I had to resort to ImageMagik crop command in order to avoid any mouse usage in the production of this diagram.

convert .../pg_staging/bird-view.png -crop '!550' bird-view.png
mv bird-view-0.png pg_staging.png

Quicker than learning to properly use a mouse, at least for me :)

From http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/ Interview with Dan Langille. We talk about the 2010 BSDCan and PGCon conferences. More information at http://www.bsdcan.org/2010/ and http://www.pgcon.org/2010/. We also talk briefly about FreeBSD 8. File Info: 16Min, 8MB.

I am very excited to start a new position at Shutterfly.com. Shutterfly is a well known internet property with a massivly growing customer base and thus new and interesting challenges in how to store, share, and organize data. What fantastic fun. I expect to post more on the growing NOSQL movement as well as continuing information on PostgreSQL and more traditional relational stores like Oracle.

Just a few minutes ago I posted the announcement below, telling the world that we've added some new committers to the PostgreSQL project. The project is extremely conservative when it comes to the source code as we're completely paranoid about breaking anything, however some have argued that we're perhaps too careful in this regard, and that our conservatism may actually be a bottleneck to the project.

Whilst the actual act of committing a change certainly isn't a bottleneck (after all, how long does it take to type 'cvs commit -m "Cool new feature from Joe"'?), the real bottleneck is in the review process, part of which involves one of our committers taking ownership of each patch, and guiding it through the final stages of the process. As patches become more and more complex, that can take more and more time - for (an extreme) example, Heikki has been reviewing Simon's Hot Standby patch for over a year now, as they refine the design and get it to a state where its ready to be committed to the main source tree. Of course, once a patch is committed, that's not necessarily the end. The committers will also take care of any post-commit cleanup, or other problems that may become apparent with any change, such as portability issues which may be highlighted by the buildfarm.

By increasing the pool of committers, we hope to ease that problem, and speed up the final stages involved in getting changes into PostgreSQL - and as all the new committers are experts with the PostgreSQL source code and work consistently to very high standards we're absolutely certain that the project's high standards will be maintained.

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On behalf of the core team, I'm pleased to announce that the PostgreSQL Project has expanded it's team of "committers", those people who are able to make direct changes to the PostgreSQL source code respository. As the project is extremely conservative about any changes made to the source code to minimise the risk of introducing any bugs, commit access is only given to contributors who have consistently shown they work to a very high standard and have shown commitment to the project.

The new committers are:

Robert Haas: Robert developed the commitfest.postgresql.org website which is used to manage the process by which features are added to PostgreSQL. He has twice acted as commitfest manager, and submitted numerous patches such as join removal, auto-generation of headers & bki files and the TRUNCATE privilege.

Simon Riggs: Simon is well know for working on large enterprise features for PostgreSQL, including Point In Time Recovery and partitioning. Simon is currently working on allowing PITR slave servers to be used for read-only queries.

Greg Stark: Greg has worked on low-level features in PostgreSQL, including asynchronous pre-fetching of data and packed variable length data types. Greg was also responsible for the CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY feature.

ITAGAKI Takahiro: ITAGAKI-san has worked on countless patches for PostgreSQL, both fixing bugs and writing new features, recently including WHEN clauses for triggers, a buffer usage feature for EXPLAIN and a new implementation of VACUUM FULL.

Congratulations!

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The current commitfest is ending soon. Keep reviewing others' patches so you can start fresh on your own :)

Backups come in three flavors: Full - backup everything Incremental - backup everything since the last Full backup Differential - backup everything since the last backup (Full or Incremental) Most systems use mtime to determine if a file has changed. Thus, any file that has been modified since the last backup will be picked up in the [...]

Finally, I’m back to the OpenSource world.

In 2004, I started working as a PostgreSQL developer and database engineer. While I was working as a PostgreSQL engineer, I was joining several PostgreSQL cluster projects, including Slony-II. Unfortunately, some were not happen, but it gave me great experiences.

At the same time, I was working as a director of Japan PostgreSQL Users Group (JPUG), and planned and run several community events such as JPUG conferences, camps and study groups. I was enjoying meeting with technical and non-technical people around PostgreSQL in Japan.

After a few years working as a PostgreSQL engineer, I moved to the datacenter business division in Oct.2007, and started working as a business developer of the datacenter services. It was very exciting to look for the market in the datacenter and cloud boom.

The reason why I moved to the datacenter division (and left PostgreSQL) was that the huge trend of the OpenSource technology was moving into the datacenter to build the cloud or next generation platform services. I predicted “Platform as a Service (PaaS)” trend before Salesforce.com used this word. Although the world is moving into the cloud as I predicted, I didn’t win the business. :-) Anyway, I was very interested in the platform services based on the OpenSource technology.

When I was in the datacenter business development, I visited San Francisco in 2008 summer vacation to attend LinuxWorld/NGDC. It was my first trip to SilliconValley, and I had my first English Lightning Talk in the pgDay at LinuxWorld.


This trip was so exciting for me, and in this trip, I made my decision to start my own company.

After I spent one year as a business developer, I moved to the system management team in the datacenter division. I was responsible to implement and manage our customers’ web platform, which uses OSS, in our datacenter.

While I was working in the datacenter, I understood the monitoring and understanding systems behaviors to keep availability and performance for many systems in the datacenter is very difficult and tough work for many (newbie) engineers. In fact, DBA and high-skilled engineers are very rare in the industry, but the monitoring and administrating are very important for the businesses.

And one month ago, I quitted my previous job, and started my own company, to run OpenSource and system management technology business.

Ok. It’s time to resume my blog to record my thoughts and experiences about the PostgreSQL and OpenSource, and I want having a discussion about such topics with many developers around the world. I will really enjoy it!

So now I should say,

"Hello, world again!"

A lot of our clients are startups, and I've been noticing a recurring pattern among them: 1. Develop web application using a framework 2. Launch it 3. It gets popular, and needs to scale 4. Application breaks 5. They call us 6. We re-write the application without the framework

We finally came up with a support lifecycle policy for PostgreSQL. The 'official' version can be found on the wiki.

It's pretty straightforward though, and reads as follows:

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The PostgreSQL project aims to fully support a major release for five years.

After a release falls out of full support, we may (at our committer's discretion) continue to apply further critical fixes to the source code, on a best-effort basis. No formal releases or binary packages will be produced by the project, but the updated source code will be available from our source code control system.

This policy will be followed on a best-effort basis. In extreme cases it may not be possible to support a release for the planned lifetime; for example if a serious bug is found that cannot be resolved in a given major version without significant risk to the stability of the code or loss of application compatibility. In such cases, early retirement of a major version may be required.

End Of Life (EOL) dates

Version	EOL Date
PostgreSQL 7.4	July 2010 (extended)
PostgreSQL 8.0	July 2010 (extended)
PostgreSQL 8.1	November 2010
PostgreSQL 8.2	December 2011
PostgreSQL 8.3	February 2013
PostgreSQL 8.4	July 2014

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pgAdmin 1.10.1 has now been released. A source tarball, and builds for Windows and Mac OS X are now available in the downloads area of the website - expect additional distributions to become available over the next few days.

pgAdmin is the leading Open Source GUI interface to PostgreSQL, and can be used on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD.


This is a bug fix release, including the following changes:

• Replace Alt-F4 with Ctrl-Q and Ctrl-W.
• Prevent a crash if the edit grid is closed whilst it is loading data.
• Don't attempt to remove rows in the edit grid if the user presses the delete key when the delete button is disabled.
• Only offer valid server encodings for new databases.
• Fix font dialogue on Snow Leopard.
• Fix an issue with the ordering of the mappings in a text search configuration.
• Fix a potential crash bug in the object browser.
• Reverse engineer empty (not NULL) ACLs correctly.
• Fix Greenplum support for column oriented partitions.
• Ensure function variables get reset if the function is modified.
• Fix cluster creation for Slony 2.0.
• Reverse engineer function defaults values correctly.
• Fix a potential crash in the edit grid.
• Fix domain creation/modification for domains in non-default schemas.
• Reverse engineer language privileges correctly.
• Get rid of "No SQL query was generated." message dialog when no tables are selected in the GQB.
• Hints files should be encoded in UTF-8.
• Include comments on procedures in the reverse engineered SQL.
• Fix debugger name resolution on 64 bit Solaris.
• Fix Slony cluster creation on Solaris.
• Fix foreign key creation on Solaris.
• Fix an SQL syntax error when viewing the dependencies of a sequence.
• Fix saving of macros.
• Better fix for schedule and step dialogs.
• Fix the menu entry in frmQuery.
• Fix the dlgFunction handling of preload libraries.
• Fix schedule and step dialogs.
• Fix error thrown when examining a Slony 2.x cluster.

Happy upgrading!

FOSDEM is a major Free and Open Source event held annually in Brussels, Belgium, and attended by around 4000 people. As in recent years, the PostgreSQL project will have a devroom where we will be presenting a number of talks. The event will be held on the 6 - 7th February 2010.

We're looking for developers, users and contributors to submit talks for inclusion on the program. Any topic related to PostgreSQL is acceptable as long as it is non-commercial in nature. Suggested topics might include:

• Migration of systems to PostgreSQL
  
• Application development
  
• Benchmarking and tuning
  
• Spatial applications
  
• Hacking the code
  
• Data warehousing
  
• New features
  
• Tips and tricks
  
• Replication
  
• Case studies
  

We will have a number of 45 minutes slots, and may split one or more into 3 back-to-back 15 minute slots if we receive suitable proposals.

Please submit your proposals to:

fosdem@postgresql.eu

and include the following information:

• Your name
  
• The title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with ~250 from other projects)
  
• A short abstract of one to two paragraphs
  
• A short biography introducing yourself
  
• Links to related websites/blogs etc.
  

The deadline for submissions is 22nd December 2009.

See you in Brussels!

So i had just another PostgreSQL course at the LinuxHotel in Essen. As always, i enjoyed working there with people interested in learning PostgreSQL within a very nice atmosphere. The reason i'm blogging about this, is that i'm really impressed how PostgreSQL has gained momentum over the last three years.

Doing such courses a few times a year at the LinuxHotel and getting regular feedback from attendees, i noticed that PostgreSQL has reached various places in the german industry and administration. Its used in ERP, Inventory Control, Data Warehouses, Webapplications, Information Retrieval. Often PostgreSQL serves mission critical applications, sometimes its used to implement a satellite system along with some other proprietary product. In many installations this was the entry key for PostgreSQL at all, since this allowed people to get their experience with PostgreSQL in a production environment without a radical change. They used this opportunity to build up their knowledge and infrastructure they need to run PostgreSQL as a backend for their applications and to recognize its reliability and stability. There are examples out there, where PostgreSQL finally replaced the main system afterwards.

At pgday there was this form you could fill to give speakers some feedback about their talks. And that's a really nice way as a speaker to know what to improve. And as Magnus was searching a nice looking chart facility in python and I spoke about matplotlib, it felt like having to publish something.

Here is my try at some nice graphics. Well I'll let you decide how nice the result is:

If you want to see the little python script I used, here it is: feedback.py, with the data embedded and all...

Now, how to read it? Well, the darker the color the better the score. For example I had 5 people score me 5 for Topic Importance on the Hi-Media talk (in french) and only 3 people at this same score and topic for pg_staging talk. The scores are from 1 to 5, 5 being the best.

The comitee accepted interesting enough topics and it seems I managed to deliver acceptable content from there. Not very good content, because reading the comments I missed some nice birds-eye pictures to help the audience get into the subject. As I'm unable to draw (with or without a mouse) I plan to fix this in latter talks by using ditaa, the DIagrams Through Ascii Art tool. I already used it and together with Emacs picture-mode it's very nice.

Oh yes the baseline of this post is that there will be later talks. I seem to be liking those and the audience feedback this time is saying that it's not too bad for them. See you soon :)