On a higher level, Postgres has a bevy of libraries, interfaces, and clients for accessing a database instance. From language APIs to GUIs like pgAdmin, or SaaS entries like JackDB, every flavor of interaction is covered. And yet, that’s only a small part of the story. For those who dare to tread into the watery depths, there’s also the world of dark incantations that is the command-line.
While most are aware of psql, the Postgres command-line client for accessing databases, there are far more creatures lurking in the black oblivion which deserve more visibility.
There comes a day in every young database’s life that it’s time to move on. I’m sorry 9.4, but the day has come that we must say goodbye. It’s not like we haven’t had our good times. While I truly appreciate everything you’ve done for me, we must part ways. I’m far too needy, and I can’t demand so much of you in good conscience. May your future patches make you and your other suitors happy!
Ah, source control. From Subversion to git and everything in between, we all love to manage our code. The ability to quickly branch from an existing base is incredibly important to exploring and potentially abandoning divergent code paths. One often overlooked Postgres feature is the template database. At first glance, it’s just a way to ensure newly created databases contain some base functionality without having to bootstrap every time, but it’s so much more than that.
Now that we’ve decided to really start embracing horizontal scaling builds, there is a critically important engine-agnostic element we need to examine. Given an existing table, how exactly should we split up the contents across our various nodes during the conversion process? Generally this is done by selecting a specific column and applying some kind of hash or custom distribution mechanism to ensure all node contents are reasonably balanced. But how do we go about figuring that out?
I always advocate breaking up large Postgres tables for a few reasons. Beyond query performance concerns, maintaining one monolithic structure is always more time consuming and consequentially more dangerous. The time required to create a dozen small indexes may be slightly longer than a single larger one, but we can treat the smaller indexes as incremental. If we want to rebuild, add more indexes, or fix any corruption, why advocate an all-or-nothing proposition?
