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.
PG Phriday: Massively Distributed Operation
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.
Why I’m Somewhat Worried About Ebola
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.
Finally Done With High Availability
Well, my publisher recently informed me that the book I’ve long been slaving over for almost a year, is finally finished. I must admit that PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook is somewhat awkward as a title, but that doesn’t detract from the contents. I’d like to discuss primarily why I wrote it.
PGCon 2014 Unconference: A Community
This May, I attended my first international conference: PGCon 2014. Though the schedule spanned from May 20th to May 23rd, I came primarily for the talks. Then there was the Unconference on the 24th. I’d never heard of such a thing, but it was billed as a good way to network and find out what community members want from PostgreSQL. After attending the Unconference, I must admit I’m exceptionally glad it exists; it’s something I believe every strong Open Source project needs.