Postgres has had anonymous blocks since the release of 9.0 in late 2010. But it must either be one of those features that got lost in the shuffle, or is otherwise considered too advanced, because I rarely see it used in the wild. If that’s the case, it’s a great shame considering the raw power it conveys. Without committing to a function, we can essentially execute any code in the database, with or without SQL input.
Fairly recently, a friend of mine presented a problem he wanted to solve with some JSON he had in a table. After he presented the end result he was trying to reach, I made the assumption that this would be pretty easy to do. But then I looked at the JSON Functions to try and find that quick fix. Though I read extensively and used rather liberal interpretations of the functions, there’s no way to directly manipulate JSON object contents with PostgreSQL.
High availability of PostgreSQL databases is incredibly important to me. You might even say it’s a special interest of mine. It’s one reason I’m both excited and saddened by a feature introduced in 9.4. I’m Excited because it’s a feature I plan to make extensive use of, and saddened because it has flown under the radar thus far. It’s not even listed in the What’s new in PostgreSQL 9.4 Wiki page.
PostgreSQL has provided table partitions for a long time. In fact, one might say it has always had partitioning. The functionality and performance of table inheritance has increased over the years, and there are innumerable arguments for using it, especially for larger tables consisting of hundreds of millions of rows. So I want to discuss a quirk that often catches developers off guard. In fact, it can render partitioning almost useless or counter-productive.
With the release of PostgreSQL 9.4, comes the ability to use binary JSON objects. This internal representation is faster and more capable than the original JSON included in 9.3. But how do we actually interact with JSON and JSONB in a database connection context? The answer is actually a little complicated and somewhat surprising.
Casting. Casting Everywhere. Despite its inclusion as an internal type, PostgreSQL maintains its position as encouraging explicit casting to avoid bugs inherent in magic type conversions.
