Bruce Momjian
VP, Postgres Evangelist, EDB
Bruce Momjian is a co-founder of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, and has worked on PostgreSQL since 1996 as a committer and community leader. He is a frequent speaker and Postgres evangelist and travels worldwide appearing at conferences to help educate the community on the business value of Postgres advances and new technology enhancements. He is the author of PostgreSQL: Introduction and Concepts, published by Addison-Wesley.
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Due to the increased popularity of Postgres, conference organizers are more confident about future conferences and are announcing their conference dates earlier, perhaps also to attract speakers. These are the conferences already announced for 2015: February, FOSDEM, Brussels (dedicated Postgres day) February, PgConf.Russia, Moscow February, SCALE, Los Angeles (dedicated Postgres day) March...
News
PostgreSQL Conference Europe has just finished and I delivered two new presentations at the conference (a first for me). Postgres Scaling Opportunities summarizes scaling options, and Flexible Indexing with Postgres summarizes indexing options. I have been submitting these presentations to conferences for many months but this is the first conference to have chosen them. The talks were well attended and generated positive feedback.
News
I just returned from attending PGConf NYC. They had 259 participants, more than double last year's total. The conference was in a hotel near Wall Street.
I just attended and presented at ConFoo, where I always learn new things. This year, the best talk I attended was by our own Magnus Hagander. Called Integrated Cache Invalidation for Better Hit Rates, it addresses the difficult task of controlling web page cache refresh by providing a reliable mechanism for invalidating the cache when the database changes. It shows how to use triggers and pgq to...
EnterpriseDB decided to put me on the spot recently by inviting queries from the community via social channels as I prepared for teaching a new PostgreSQL course. It’s a familiar spot for me. I regularly field questions about PostgreSQL given my role in the community and I was happy to get a question through Twitter. The question, which came from a Twitter user in Sweden, was: "Is native...
EDB Labs
Sql has never been good at handling dynamic columns — it can easily process tables with a fixed number of columns, but dynamic column handling has always been a challenge. (Dynamic columns are often used to implement user-defined fields.) One approach has been to define columns for every possible value that might be stored in a row; this leads to sparse tables containing mostly null values.
Databases store data in table columns, but sometimes it is useful to create non-storage columns for code clarity. For example, you might need to access a combination of columns frequently and don't want to repeatedly perform the combining operation in your application. In this case, a column can be created that acts as a virtual read-only column. In the example below, a fullname function is...
Postgres, since version 8.2, has supported the ability to create indexes without blocking writes (insert, update, or delete) on the table being indexed. This is done by adding the keyword concurrently to the create index command. (Reads are never blocked by create index.) Implementing this feature was very complex, and it has been recently discovered that all versions of pg_upgrade have a bug...
EDB Labs
You might already be aware that Postgres updates the process title of all its running processes. For example, this is a Debian Linux ps display for an idle Postgres server: postgres 2544 2543 0 10:47 ? 00:00:00 /u/pgsql/bin/postmaster -i postgres 2546 2544 0 10:47 ? 00:00:00 postgres: checkpointer process postgres 2547 2544 0 10:47 ? 00:00:00 postgres: writer process postgres 2548 2544 0 10:47...
EDB Labs
Object Identifiers (oids) were added to Postgres as a way to uniquely identify database objects, e.g. rows, tables, functions, etc. It is part of Postgres's object-relational heritage.