Thursday, July 25, 2013

Better info in Building with Mingw/Msys on Windows

I've improved the information on setting up a PostgreSQL development environment on Windows. It now covers building from git as well as from tarballs, and a bunch of other changes.

What does a DBA do?

Someone was asking on IRC about what a DBA does, and I found this link. It's fairly Oracle-centric, understandably since it's from an Oracle FAQ, but still quite a good description of all the things a DBA has to do.

Friday, July 19, 2013

More info on the Buildfarm dashboard page

I'm fairly conservative about adding things to the Buildfarm dashboard page. Probably screens are mostly wider than they used to be back when the buildfarm was written, but I try to make sure there won't be any line wrap.

But today I did add something - each line now shows the git HEAD ref of the build in question. That makes it easier to see which builds contain a certain commit. This was at the request of Stephen Frost. I think we can afford the extra line width.

The changes to the web app were tiny. The database required a bit more - the dashboard is driven by a bespoke manually refreshed materialized view, and that table and the view used to refresh it had to have the extra column added.

I hope this proves useful.

Monday, July 1, 2013

SAS supports PostgreSQL

From a recent email:
Another good thing for SAS, is they FINALLY support postgres. Next month the next major version of SAS (9.4) is being released which has postgres support. Their midtier infrastructure service actually uses postgres for backend db stuff, which was very surprising to me that SAS is using it to support its own stuff now.

You can actually demo VA here:
http://www.sas.com/software/visual-analytics/overview.html

I have very fond memories of SAS - SQL and SAS were the first two computer languages I learned, back in the 1980s, and my knowledge of SAS largely helped me pay for my way through University when I returned to study in 1988. Sadly, I've hardly touched it in the last 20 years, even though they are headquartered here  a couple of miles from my house. They are consistently said to be one of the best places in the world to work. So it's nice to see them supporting PostgreSQL.