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.

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.