A big news day

Of course the biggest news of the day is that Amazon has announced immediate support for Postgres on their RDS service.

I have taken this for a very short spin, and it looks like it works as I expected.

I noticed a couple of things. First, it doesn't require SSL to connect. That's probably not a good thing. They should have at least an option to require use of SSL. And second, they don't seem to have support for the awesome pg_stat_statements module, which is such an important tool in the modern Postgres DBA's arsenal. I hope I'm wrong or that they fix that one quickly.

The other interesting news I heard for the first time today from my colleague Jeff Frost, is that Ubuntu have released a new kernel version for the 12.04 LTS release that doesn't have the performance horrors of earlier kernels. That should be good news for lots of Ubuntu users. I have one client who downgraded to a non-LTS release on the basis of the performance regression, so this is a big deal.