Just got back from extended trip to Database.Camp – Sunday, July 10, 2016 – at the UN in NYC – Totally Free! Wide range of presentations from CTOs/CEOs from across the database software world, with about 200 attendees, slightly more people earlier in the day. Very happy to report we had 3 presentations covering different aspects of PostgreSQL * EnterpriseDB – Ed Boyajian – Building Postgres...

A salesman from Oracle recently spoke to my sales colleague at a conference, teasing him that he should “come make some money”. That was quite surprising, given Oracle’s well documented problems in gaining new sales, most especially what they say in their own public filings. The reply was unsurprisingly: “No, thanks – I’d like a permanent job.” Oracle’s rising open source problem http://www...

Questions How do you tell what version of PostgreSQL you are using? What is the version number of your PostgreSQL server? What’s the release of your Postgres server? What release is your Postgres database? How do I write a program that acts differently for different versions of the PostgreSQL server? Answer For a long time it’s been possible to write a query to find out what version your server is...

31 May 2016 – http://pgday.fr/ PgDay France was a well attended conference with more than 140 attendees, with many presentations from PostgreSQL users further demonstrating just how popular PostgreSQL is now. It was good to see a large well organized conference in Lille, the “capital of Northern France”. Lille is an industrial hub and university town, with an airport to give access to rest of...

PostgreSQL 9.6 has a lot of good features; many of the changes are in the SQL planner, aiming to improve performance by carefully selecting the right execution plan. The great thing here is that doing less work makes many queries much, much faster than they were before. First, we are now using Foreign Key data in the planner to improve estimates. Next, we are combining aggregates to avoid...

Just back from a few days vacation to some great news: PostgreSQL now supports Parallel Aggregation. Parallel scans sound great, but its parallel aggregation and joins where we need parallel query most of all. So this latest step is exactly what we need to take PostgreSQL to the next level. David Rowley’s latest version of parallel aggregation has now been committed, with results showing its...

If you try to update the same data at the same time in multiple locations, your application has a significant problem, period. That’s what I call the physics of multi-master. How that problem manifests itself is really based upon your choice of technology. Choosing Postgres, Oracle or ProblemoDB won’t change the problem, just gives you choices for handling the problem. If you choose single master...

PostgreSQL has built-in streaming replication. Why do we need new replication? Well, in some cases, we do need more. Which is why we have pglogical. The existing replication is more properly known as Physical Streaming Replication since we are streaming a series of physical changes from one node to another. That means that when we insert a row into a table we generate change records for the insert...

“Joins Don’t Scale”. Well, that’s what I heard MongoDB said anyway. My response was “Huh? Yeh, they do”. So what gives? Who is right? Why the mixup? Well, first thing to realise is that the implicit topic we are talking about is massively parallel (MPP) databases, so what they are talking about is the scalability of a join between two tables that are spread across multiple nodes of an MPP database...

On hearing news that MongoDB had lost half its value recently, the phrase “Half sunk” came to mind from Shelley’s Ozymandias. I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read...