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.

One of the job prospects I was interviewing with presented me with a question last week: “We’d like to schedule a final culture interview with you, but before we do, we were wondering if you would entertain a contractor role?” Given I don’t know what’s actually involved with that, I went with an honest answer of “I don’t have the necessary background to act as a 1099, so it would have to be full time.

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.