September 30th, 2016 | Published in Database, Tech Talk | No Comments
Timing can often be extremely fortuitous. Yesterday marked the official release of Postgres 9.6!
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Yaaaaayy…[/caption]September 23rd, 2016 | Published in Database, Tech Talk | 1 Comment
When it comes to putting Postgres through its paces, we often turn to benchmarks to absolutely bury it under a torrent of oppressive activity. It’s a great way to obtain maximum performance metrics and also observe how Postgres reacts and breaks down under such pressure. But these kinds of tests aren’t really practical, are they? After all, many such simulated workloads are nothing but bragging rights measured against previous Postgres releases, or for hardware comparisons. But while functionality beyond defaults is often overlooked, tools like pgbench are actually critical to the development process.
September 16th, 2016 | Published in Database, Tech Talk | No Comments
There seem to be quite a few popular Postgres conferences peppering the globe these days. This year, Simon Riggs of 2ndQuadrant gave the sponsored keynote at Postgres Open. I’m not entirely sure it was intentional since it wasn’t the title of his presentation, but he uttered the words “working together to make Postgres better for everyone” at one point. The phrase “Working Together” really stood out, because that’s a significant part of what makes Postgres so great. It resonated acutely with the impetus behind the [intlink id='pgcon-2014-unconference-a-community']Unconference track[/intlink] that remains a regular fixture at PGCon.
September 9th, 2016 | Published in Database, Tech Talk | No Comments
Say hi to Princess Kittybutt. She’ll be our mascot (and subject) for today. We’ll get to her in a minute.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail, right? With Postgres becoming more of an environment than simply a database engine, this colloquialism is starting to resemble reality. Of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing! As Postgres accumulates copious and varied extensions, its role as an adaptive middleware solidifies. When Postgres can do something for itself, the need for sprawling harnesses of support scripts steadily decreases.
September 2nd, 2016 | Published in Database, Tech Talk | 1 Comment
It’s no surprise Postgres does more than merely store data; you can’t do everything with SQL. Often, it’s often more beneficial to process data locally without transmitting it to a client interface. Local manipulation can save hours in network traffic alone, let alone client-side allocation and per-row processing. Databases like Postgres are specifically for bulk data operations, so why not take advantage?
