Remember this guy?
Robo-Postgres returns!
AI is all anyone talks about these days, isn’t it? Even when it comes to databases like Postgres, devs are finding new and innovative ways to leverage LLMs in everyday use cases. Can you really blame them though? This is an exciting new technology that will transform how we work and potentially society as a whole once it finally matures. We even covered building a crude RAG app a few short weeks ago.
Have you ever wanted to use a non-superuser role in a Postgres database to perform actions that are normally restricted? Even something as simple as reading from the pg_stat_activity view requires special permissions to view the query column because it could contain sensitive information.
The last few PG Phriday articles have been somewhat dense content, so how about something a bit more irreverent? Rather than wax on about AI, HA architectures, or conceptual advancements to Postgres clusters, why not write a game instead? To keep things simple, let’s just build a no-frills Tamagotchi virtual pet for bored database professionals.
There’s a lot of SQL in this article, so check out the git page for this blog if you want to follow along.
Has it really come to this?
AI is everywhere these days
Postgres and AI go together like elephants and chocolate. At first glance, it seems like a silly combination. Postgres is an RDBMS for storing data with ACID compliance, functions, views, and maybe some extensions or foreign data wrappers. Where is room for AI in that? It may be trendy to take something, rub some AI on it, and then declare it a breakthrough technology, but that isn’t necessarily reality.
Last Phriday we explored just where Postgres could end up in the future. One possible question which may have occurred to a reader was probably something along the lines of “That doesn’t even really sound like Postgres anymore. Why not just write another database?”
Let’s just be outright about it: Postgres is the best RDBMS engine currently available. It’s certainly bold to claim that any database engine is “the best”, and as the saying goes, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
