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.

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.

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.

A literate client comments on Postgres

Some clients are more fun than others. Today, after I told one client of a long standing feature of Postgres that he was unaware of, he channelled his inner bard and sent me this email:

Steve:
How beauteous this software is!
O brave new database
That has such commands in't!

Andrew:
'Tis new to thee. 

 (To save you looking it up, he's adapting a well known passage in The Tempest).

Things like this make my day.

Release 4.11 of PostgreSQL Buildfarm client

Version 4.11 of the PostgreSQL Buildfarm client has been released. It can be downloaded from http://www.pgbuildfarm.org/downloads/releases/build-farm-4_11.tgz

Changes since 4.10:

• Turn down module cleanup verbosity
• Add check for rogue postmasters.
• Add pseudo-branch targets HEAD_PLUS_LATEST and HEAD_PLUS_LATEST2.
• Use Digest::SHA instead of Digest::SHA1.
• Make directory handling more robust in git code.
• Move web transaction into a module procedure.
• Switch to using the porcelain format of git status.
• Provide parameter for core file patterns.
• Use a command file for gdb instead of the -ex option

The web transaction and Digest::SHA changes have allowed the removal of a couple of long-standing uglinesses on the system. In almost all cases, the config parameter "aux_path" and the separate run_web_transaction.pl script are now redundant (the exception is older Msys systems).


Enjoy

This is what beta is for

Today on IRC someone who has been testing out the new JSON stuff complained about a case I hadn't catered for, namely someone representing a Unicode character outside the Basic Multilingual Plane as a surrogate pair of characters constructed with the '\u' JSON escape. This is explicitly allowed in the JSON spec, so it needs to be handled. It's going to be a bit ugly to fix this, I suspect, but I'm glad to find out about it now rather than later. Thank goodness for beta testers.

Redis FDW Singleton Key tables

I recently mentioned the possibility of tables being drawn from a single Redis object, so you would get one row per key/value pair in the named hash, or one row per element in the named scalar, set, list or zset. This has now been committed, for use with Release 9.2 and later. There are examples in the regression test files. This is going to be particularly important when we get to writable tables, which is the next order of business.

For those of you who were in my talk yesterday, the breakage I mentioned has now been fixed.

Redis talk slides

Here are the slides from my talk on PostgreSQL and Redis.

Blackhole FDW

My Blackhole FDW talk seemed to go well. The line about no unintentional data loss got the best laugh. Here are the slides.

Besides being a bit of fun, this did have a serious purpose - creating a skeleton for building an FDW, including the writable API. The code has the contents of the docs on writing an FDW as comments in the appropriate functions, to help a new FDW writer.

The code is on bitbucket.

Buildfarm download location

It was just pointed out to me that the download link on the buidfarm server front page wasn't updated when I fixed the other links after switching to publishing them on the buildfarm server itself. That's been fixed now. The only valid link for downloading the client is http://www.pgbuildfarm.org/downloads/. Sorry for any confusion.

Developer meeting went well

There seems to be a consensus, which I share, that the annual PostgreSQL Developers Meeting went much better this year that in the previous couple of years.

One item of note: the commit fest managers are going to be much more vigilant about making sure that if you have signed up for a review you will work on it right away, and about removing reviewers who are not producing reviews. So you will be able to have much more confidence that if someone is signed up as a reviewer for a patch they will actually be doing the work.

After the meeting and the obligatory visit to the Royal Oak, a number of us went out and had a pleasant Indian meal, and then I came back to the hotel, fixed a customer problem,  and wrote up some slides for my proposed lightning talk. More on this later.

Now, on to the conference proper!