Posts

• Jan 30, 2023

  PostgreSQL supply chain

  If you are an application developer and you build on PostgreSQL, then maybe you have looked into where PostgreSQL comes from, who develops it, and where you can get professional help if needed.

  Now, if you are a PostgreSQL developer (hi!), do you know what you are building on, where those things come from, who develops them, and where you get get professional help if needed?

• Jan 11, 2023

  PostgreSQL largest commits

  I like to poke around the PostgreSQL Git repository to find interesting statistics and trends that affect PostgreSQL development. The question I had lately is, what are the largest patches that have been committed? That might indicate some kind of upper bound on the size of features you can get committed in one piece. If something is larger, you might need to split it up.

• Dec 27, 2022

  PostgreSQL hidden gems

  There is a PostgreSQL major release every year, and every release has about 200 changes listed in the release notes. A handful of those are typically listed at the top as “major items”, which are highlighted for the benefit of the public.

• Dec 13, 2022

  PostgreSQL commit times

  PostgreSQL development has certainly professionalized over the years, in the sense that more people do it as a job now rather than (only) as a hobby. I was wondering whether that would be visible in the time of day when people do publicly visible PostgreSQL work.

• Nov 29, 2022

  git range-diff

  Let’s say you are following a patch in the PostgreSQL commit fest. The author has posted “v5” of a patch, some feedback has been sent, the author comes back with “v6” and a note saying that they have incorporated all that feedback. How do you check what actually changed?

• Oct 25, 2022

  PostgreSQL 15 statistics

  I have been gathering some statistics about each major PostgreSQL release. Here is the update for this year:

• Oct 11, 2022

  PostgreSQL system catalogs schema diagrams

  Some time ago, someone asked on a PostgreSQL mailing list whether there was a diagram of the PostgreSQL system catalogs. There wasn’t at the time. Something like that used to be included in the PostgreSQL documentation, but it was never updated, and so it was eventually removed.

• Sep 26, 2022

  ICU features in PostgreSQL 15

  One of the new features in PostgreSQL 15 is that you can use ICU collations on a database and instance level.

• Sep 13, 2022

  git diff and git log and dots

  A little while ago, we had a few PostgreSQL hackers in a room and someone oversaw me typing something like

• Apr 21, 2022

  git rebase and ORIG_HEAD

  I seem to be doing this a lot:

• Jul 20, 2016

  Using GNU GLOBAL with PostgreSQL

  When you are coding in a source tree as big as PostgreSQL’s, you will at some point want to look into some kind of source code indexing. It’s often convenient not to bother, since git grep is actually superfast. But when you want to find where a function is defined among all the call sites, some more intelligence is useful.

• Apr 11, 2016

  Some git log tweaks

  Here are some tweaks to git log that I have found useful. It might depend on the workflow of individual projects how applicable this is.

• Dec 7, 2015

  Check your pg_dump compression levels

  I was idly wondering what was taking pg_dump so long and noticed that it always seemed to be pegged at 100% CPU usage on the client. That was surprising because naively one might think that the bottleneck are the server’s or the client’s disk or the network. Profiling quickly revealed that the compression library zlib was taking most of the run time on the client. And indeed, turning compression off caused pg_dump to fly without getting anywhere near 100% CPU.

• Aug 14, 2015

  Have problems with PostgreSQL? Try using Hive!

  So I had this PostgreSQL database that was getting a bit too big, and since it was really only for analytics, I figured it would be a good fit for putting in Hadoop+Hive instead.

• Apr 16, 2015

  Storing URIs in PostgreSQL

  About two months ago, this happened:

• Mar 25, 2015

  Retrieving PgBouncer statistics via dblink

  PgBouncer has a virtual database called pgbouncer. If you connect to that you can run special SQL-like commands, for example

• Mar 3, 2015

  The history of replication in PostgreSQL

  2001: PostgreSQL 7.1: write-ahead log

• Feb 16, 2015

  Listing screen sessions on login

  There is a lot of helpful information about screen out there, but I haven’t found anything about this. I don’t want to “forget” any screen sessions, so I’d like to be notified when I log into a box and there are screens running for me. Obviously, there is screen -ls, but it needs to be wrapped in a bit logic so that it doesn’t annoy when there is no screen running or even installed.

• Jan 8, 2015

  Directing output to multiple files with zsh

  Normally, this doesn’t work as one might naively expect:

• Dec 1, 2014

  ccache and clang, part 3

  In part 1 and part 2 I investigated how to use ccache with clang. That was more than three years ago.

• Nov 4, 2014

  Checking whitespace with Git

  Whitespace matters.

• Oct 25, 2014

  First post

  This is my new blog. My old blog was here, but it was time to move on.

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