Neues vom PostgreSQL Planet

Postgres turns 34 this year. Michael Stonebraker, during his 2015 Turing Award speech (which I blogged about previously), included the names of the 39 Berkeley students (plus co-leader Larry Rowe) who helped write the original version of Postgres.

PostgreSQL Person of the Week Interview with Dan Langille: I am Canadian. Born in Nova Scotia and attended high school and university in Ottawa. I moved to New Zealand shortly after graduation. After 16 years in Wellington, NZ, where I got into Open Souce via FreeBSD, I moved back to Ottawa. I lived there for 6 years, then moved to USA. I now live in a small town outside Philadelphia.

When working on the internals of Citus, an open source extension to Postgres that transforms Postgres into a distributed database, we often get to talk with customers that have interesting challenges you won’t find everywhere. Just a few months back, I encountered an analytics workload that was a really good fit for Citus.

But we had one problem: the percentile calculations on their data (over 300 TB of data) could not meet their SLA of 30 seconds.

PL/Python can be a convenient and powerful way to take advantage of your PostgreSQL database. In an earlier post, I talked a little bit about how you can use modules included in the Python standard library with PL/Python functions.

I recently wrote a presentation, Postgres and the Artificial Intelligence Landscape, which covers the basics of artificial intelligence and shows how Postgres can be used for this purpose. This week I presented it at the Chicago PostgreSQL Meetup Group so I am now publishing the slides.

I released new almost bug-fix release 3.1.4 of pspg. There is new light theme Flatwhite based on Dmitry Biletskyy flatwhite theme.

I recently gave a talk about the Citus extension to Postgres at the Warsaw PostgreSQL Users Group. Unfortunately, I did not get to go in person to beautiful Warsaw, but it was still a nice way to interact with the global Postgres community and talk about what Citus is, how it works, and what it can do for you.

We have already got acquainted with PostgreSQL indexing engine and the interface of access methods and discussed hash indexes, B-trees, as well as GiST and SP-GiST indexes. And this article will feature GIN index.

Postgres has made great strides in adding features to match proprietary databases, and it has many complex features that other databases don't have. However, that doesn't mean it is the best fit for every organization. There are still reasons not to use Postgres:

A simple description of the new WITH TIES standard feature in PostgreSQL 13.

© Laurenz Albe 2020

HOT updates are not a new feature. They were introduced by commit 282d2a03dd in 2007 and first appeared in PostgreSQL 8.3.

Sometimes, PostgreSQL databases need to import large quantities of data in a single or a minimal number of steps. This process can be sometimes unacceptably slow. In this article, we will cover some best practice tips for bulk importing data into PostgreSQL databases.

PostgreSQL 13 is a lucky release! There are some very impactful new features and the release is coming out at its regularly scheduled time in the fall.

PostgreSQL will create some catalog and other caches for each connection request to store some queried data locally, which can speed up query efficiency. If a process undergoes a DDL operation that causes catalog to change, other running processes need to be notified that some cache data is invalid. We call this notification mechanism the SI (Share Invalid) mechanism.

Database applications are initially written using the simplest queries possible. During testing and in production, some application tasks might have unacceptable performance. This is where re-architecturing happens, and where simple queries and data schema layouts can get complex. They might get complex because it is required to accomplish the task, or it might be because of limitations in how the database software handles certain queries. Database and tooling upgrades can require further complex additions.

PostgreSQL Person of the Week Interview with Anthony Nowocien: Hi, I’m Anthony Nowocien. My name comes from my Polish side and some of my looks from my Trinidadian side. I live and work in Paris as a PostgreSQL DBA.

I tested Fedora 33 on my old Lenovo T510 (enhanced 16GB RAM). It looks pretty well. The interactive processes are quick under high load (what was some time problem in older releases).  It is very nice and comfortable.

0. The problem

Some time ago I’ve stumbled on this interesting question on stackoverflow (as stated in the title). I could not find any satisfactory answer at that time, so I came up with this solution. I think the problem is interesting enough to make it into a blog post.

The following table shows the expected results. The x column contains the original data whereas mdn_x contains the median computed from current up to 3 preceding rows.

At the core of the “10 Things I Hate About PostgreSQL” blog post, sits one particular observation that seems like a simple annoyance at first glance. MVCC is presented merely as item 4 in the list, but like XIDs, it serves as a star upon which an entire constellation of related stellar objects converge. While […]

I recently wrote a presentation, Postgres in the Cloud: The Hard Way, which shows how to create a cloud instance, and install and run Postgres, purely from the command line. This helps show how all the pieces fit together. I recently presented this at pgDay Israel so I am now publishing the slides.