Database

It occurs to me I forgot to congratulate the winners of the free ebooks. So without further ado:

• SAB, who seems to host a nice blog geared toward server administration.
• Stephan, who’s looking to improve existing strategies.
• Jeff and his growing PostgreSQL cluster.
• Pierre, who apparently has an experimental PostgreSQL backend for MySQL. Interesting.

Congrats to the winners. But more, I call upon them to pay it forward by contributing to the community, either by corresponding with the excellent PostgreSQL mailing lists, or maybe submitting a patch or two to the code. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and more warm bodies always helps. :)

Let’s face it, the pg_hba.conf file is a pain in the ass to use regularly. Sure, reloading the database will cause it to re-read this file, but with a lot of active users and frequent changes, this isn’t really tenable.

A little while ago, I wrote to the PostgreSQL general mailing list that I’d been approached by Packt Publishing to contribute a quick manual on doing PostgreSQL backups: Instant PostgreSQL Backup and Restore How-to. They’re the same guys who published Greg Smith’s PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance book which everyone seems to swear by.

Well, that was an interesting couple of days. Unfortunately my birthday came right after and I didn’t feel like writing anything for the duration. Now though? Why not!

In the end, I think my presentation, NVRam for Fun and Profit went over okay. Not a ton of people showed up, but I did get ambushed afterwards with questions after I got off the stage. Why those people didn’t ask while I was in Presentation Mode, I can’t quite understand. But Greg Smith was there, and he played the required heckler, so it wasn’t all bad.

A few months ago, Greg Smith of PostgreSQL fame suggested I submit a proposal to the new Postgres Open conference here in Chicago. Some of us residents of the Midwest have long waited for a PostgreSQL-related conference of our very own, and now the glorious day has finally arrived. I was asked to submit proposals to other conferences, but the travel involved quickly put me off; now I can be lazy and still help spread The Word.