Last week I was invited by the Dutch PostgreSQL User Group in Amsterdam to speak on PostgreSQL Administration Recipes. It was the first session of 2016, and the third since they started meeting last year. Using the simple format of a cooking recipe, I presented some techniques that a PostgreSQL DBA can use to solve recurring problems, for instance: change your password without leaving traces of...

An interesting query has been twitted by Will Leinweber from Postgres Open: -- this returns a different result each time it is ran with recursive s as ( select random() union select random() from s ) select count(*) from s; I like this example: a surprising result, which can be explained by (and indeed helps to explain) CTE behaviour. Unexpected truths are denoted with the word “paradox”, and in...

I have been lucky enough to be invited at the marvellous PGDay.eu 2012 conference in Stuttgart, which ended just yesterday. The topic of the first of my two talks has been a collection of PostgreSQL objects that play chess, either between themselves or against a human. My intention was to present the software, tidy up the code a bit (out of respect for the fellow PostgreSQL user 🙂 and then release...

Last week at the CHAR(10) conference we had a workshop on “Cloud Databases”. To put it simply: what to do when the use case requirements exceed the resources available in the database server. This was a main topic of the whole conference, and several solutions have been illustrated during the day. A common theme has been that no solution fits all the use cases, and that each solution comes with...