Testing patches with a couple of commands using a buildfarm animal

I've blogged before about how the buildfarm client software can be useful for developers amd reviewers. Yesterday was a perfect example. I was testing a set of patches for a bug fix for pg_upgrade running on Windows, and they go all the way back to the 9.0 release. The simplest way to test these was using a buildfarm animal. On jacana, I applied the relevant patch in each branch repo, and then simply did this to build and test them all:

for f in root/[RH]* ; do 
  br=`basename $f`
  perl ./run_build.pl --from-source=`pwd`/$f/pgsql --config=jacana.conf --verbose $br
done

After it was all done and everything worked, I cleaned up the git repositories so they were ready for more buildfarm runs:

for f in root/[RH]* ; do 
  pushd $f/pgsql
  git reset --hard
  git clean -dfxq
  popd
done

Pretty simple! The commands are shown here on multiple lines for clarity, but in fact I wrote each set on one line, so after applying the patches the whole thing took 2 lines. (Because jacana only builds back to release 9.2, I had to repeat the process on frogmouth for 9.0 and 9.1, using the same process).

new pg_partman release

Keith Fiske's pg_partman is a pretty nice tool for managing partitions of tables. I've recommended it recently to a couple of clients, and it's working well for them.

Based on that I have made a couple of suggestions for improvement, and today he's made a release including one of them. Previously, the script to rebuild the child indexes essentially removed them all and rebuilt them. Now it only removes those that are no longer on the parent table, and only adds those that are on the parent but not on the child, so if you just add or delete one index on the parent that's all that gets done on the children too.

I'm happy to say that he's also working on my other, more significant suggestion, which is to have a hybrid partitioning mode where the trigger has static inserts for the likely common tables and dynamic inserts for the rest. That will mean you don't have to make nasty choices between flexibility and speed. I'm looking forward to it.