On a higher level, Postgres has a bevy of libraries, interfaces, and clients for accessing a database instance. From language APIs to GUIs like pgAdmin, or SaaS entries like JackDB, every flavor of interaction is covered. And yet, that’s only a small part of the story. For those who dare to tread into the watery depths, there’s also the world of dark incantations that is the command-line.
While most are aware of psql, the Postgres command-line client for accessing databases, there are far more creatures lurking in the black oblivion which deserve more visibility.
Postgres is a great tool for most databases. Larger installations however, pretty much require horizontal scaling; addressing multi-TB tables relies on multiple parallel storage streams thanks to the laws of physics. It’s how all immense data stores work, and for a long time, Postgres really had no equivalent that wasn’t a home-grown shard management wrapper. To that end, we’ve been considering Postgres-XL as a way to fill that role. At first, everything was going well.
I’ve been a Postgres DBA since 2005. After all that time, I’ve come to a conclusion that I’m embarrassed I didn’t reach much earlier: Postgres is awful. This isn’t a “straw that broke the camel’s back” kind of situation; there is a litany of ridiculous idiocy in the project that’s, frankly, more than enough to stave off any DBA, end user, or developer. But I’ll limit my list to five, because clickbait.
Postgres has been lacking something for quite a while, and more than a few people have attempted to alleviate the missing functionality multiple times. I’m speaking of course, about parallel queries. There are several reasons for this, and among them include various distribution and sharding needs for large data sets. When tables start to reach hundreds of millions, or even billions of rows, even high cardinality indexes produce results very slowly.
Before I really get going with this post, I want to say I’m not panicked, and I suggest you stay the same. Meanwhile, it’s pretty clear the currently cavalier attitude toward Ebola needs to change. And of course, it all boils down to humans being the fallible creatures they are.
How Ebola Works There’s good information on How Ebola Works, and how it kills you, but I’ll summarize. Ebola is a Biosafety Level 4 contagion, meaning proper attire when interacting with infected is a fully sealed safety suit with respirator, which should be decontaminated before and after exposure.
