Before I really get going with this post, I want to say I’m not panicked, and I suggest you stay the same. Meanwhile, it’s pretty clear the currently cavalier attitude toward Ebola needs to change. And of course, it all boils down to humans being the fallible creatures they are. How Ebola Works There’s good information on How Ebola Works, and how it kills you, but I’ll summarize. Ebola is a Biosafety Level 4 contagion, meaning proper attire when interacting with infected is a fully sealed safety suit with respirator, which should be decontaminated before and after exposure.

Recently I stumbled across a question on Reddit regarding the performance impact of using pgBadger on an active database server. The only real answer to this question is: do not use pgBadger. Before anyone asks—no, you shouldn’t use pgFouine either. This is not an indictment on the quality of either project, but a statement of their obsolescence in the face of recent PostgreSQL features. One of the recommended postgresql.conf changes for both of these tools is to set log_min_duration_statement to 0.

Well, my publisher recently informed me that the book I’ve long been slaving over for almost a year, is finally finished. I must admit that PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook is somewhat awkward as a title, but that doesn’t detract from the contents. I’d like to discuss primarily why I wrote it. When Packt first approached me in October of 2013, I was skeptical. I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of the “cookbook” style they’ve been pushing lately.

Programming is fun. I love programming! Ever since I changed my career from programming to database work, I’ve still occasionally dabbled in my former craft. As such, I believe I can say this with a fair amount of accuracy: programmers don’t understand databases. This isn’t something small, either; there’s a fundamental misunderstanding at play. Unless the coder happens to work primarily with graphics, bulk set-based transformations are not something they’ll generally work with.

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. I’m going to get this out of the way now: The postgres_fdw foreign data wrapper only works with hard-coded plain-text passwords, forever the bane of security-conscious IT teams everywhere.