June 11th, 2014 | Published in Database, Tech Talk | 5 Comments
When I heard about foreign tables using the new postgres_fdw foreign data wrapper in PostgreSQL 9.3, I was pretty excited. We hadn’t upgraded to 9.3 so I waited until we did before I did any serious testing. Having done more experimentation with it, I have to say I’m somewhat disappointed. Why? Because of how authentication was implemented.
May 27th, 2014 | Published in Contemplation, Database, News, Tech Talk | 4 Comments
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.
May 14th, 2014 | Published in Database, Tech Talk | 6 Comments
PostgreSQL is a pretty good database, and I enjoy working with it. However, there is an implementation detail that not everyone knows about, which can drastically affect table performance. What is this mysterious feature? I am, of course, referring to foreign keys.
May 8th, 2014 | Published in Database, Tech Talk | No Comments
With the release of PostgreSQL 8.4, the community gained the ability to use CTE syntax. As such, this is a fairly old feature, yet it’s still misunderstood in a lot of ways. At the same time, the query planner has been advancing incrementally since that time. Most recently, PostgreSQL has gained the ability to perform index-only scans, making it possible to fetch results straight from the index, without confirming rows with the table data.
Unfortunately, this still isn’t enough. There are still quite a few areas where the PostgreSQL query planner is extremely naive, despite the advances we’ve seen recently. For instance, PostgreSQL still can’t do a basic loose index scan natively. It has to be tricked by using CTE syntax.
March 27th, 2014 | Published in Database, Tech Talk | 2 Comments
I’ve managed to convince my employer to open source one of the tools I recently wrote. That tool goes by the name of walctl, and I believe the importance of this kind of tool can not be overstated.
The PostgreSQL Write Ahead Log (WAL) files are key to crash recovery, point in time recovery, and all standby use not derived from streaming replication. WAL files are extremely critical to proper database operation. Yet their archival is treated as an afterthought. Some people use regular cp while others go as far as to use rsync to send data to a replica server.
This isn’t enough.
