Features still wanted

I was uploading my recent slide decks to SlideShare and noticed I had the deck there from a talk I gave about 4 years ago at TriLug about new features in Postgres 8.4. In there is a slide (#24) labeled "Major missing SQL features" and containing these two items:

• grouping sets
• merge

Sadly, four years later those features are still missing. And they are still the thing I think are the most urgent new SQL features we should provide.  Both are hard to do well, and probably both require major funding kicks to have any chance of being done.

Interesting new technologies

A couple of things I heard about at Postgres Open that deserve closer inspection are Docker, a nice container toolkit, leveraging among other things Linux LXC, and OpenShift, another containerization platform. Today I discovered that while I was travelling home yesterday (and taking far too long about it), a major announcement was made of collaboration between Docker and RedHat, the principal sponsors of OpenShift. This is pretty cool stuff. OpenShift already has "cartridge" for PostgreSQL, and I am going to play with it the first opportunity I get.

NC Triangle PUG here we go

Quite by chance I and two other people from the NC Triangle area (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and surrounds) went to the 2ndQuadrant sponsored dinner (thanks guys) at Postgres Open on Monday night. Out of that came a proposal for a Triangle Postgres Users Group. I set a few things in motion on that today, and I hope it will be a reality very soon. Please email me if you are interested and live in the area, so I can make sure we don't miss you when everything gets set up.

Slides from Postgres Open - 9.3 JSON and Blackhole FDW

Here are the slides from my talk at Postgres Open about JSON in Postgres 9.3

I also reprised my pgCon lightning talk about the Blackhole Foreign Data Wrapper.

Yet another reason to hate subversion ...

Yesterday, a family member who is new to subversion fat-fingered a commit and instead of committing just one file committed a whole large directory. It's an easy enough thing to do. My initial reaction was "OK, it shouldn't be too hard to roll that back." After all, I use git reset on a fairly regular basis.

Turns out this is actually quite hard to do. Here is one description of how to do it. Yuck.