Postgres and Open Source Experts

This is the second part in a series of blog posts describing PostgreSQL analogs of common Oracle queries

One of the most intricate Oracle specific constructions is "START WITH ... CONNECT BY". According to Oracle's documentation, the syntax is: SELECT [query] [START WITH initial_condition] CONNECT BY [nocycle] condition. This statement is commonly used to traverse hierarchical data in the parent-child order. It's easier to illustrate how it works with …

As with any healthy project, there will be offshoots and people will take the source, fork it and try to create something new, better, different or just.... How that person feels it should be. This is a good thing, it leads to new ideas, new communities and sometimes truly interesting pieces of software.

Postgres-XC has been around for a while, it is primarily developed by NTT and EnterpriseDB. It has …

It is with regret that I announce that PgNext is cancelled. I am not sure what is next for the PostgreSQL Conference series. The reasons are long and myriad and I will not bore you with them. However I will present the following video:


If you can't see the video, here is the video link.

That video represents why I would put on the conferences. They were fun. We had …

Once upon a time, JD was a assistant manager for Block Buster video. This was a very long time ago and before a 23 month employment stint at Powells Books. It was at Powells that the world of computers was actually introduced to me as a viable employment option. While there I designed a special order database in DBase IV, was introduced to University Ingres, went through Book Buyer …

As a reminder, the CFP for PgNext is still open. We are in Denver this year, let's make it rock! This year we are keeping it simple and getting back to roots. The conference is about community, networking with professionals, learning and in general having a good time. Who can't have a good time in Denver?

Our team has been hard at work on several things. One is the URI patch for libpq which was just committed and sponsored by Heroku (Thanks Heroku). This is a novel patch that brings standard URI connection handling to libpq and any client/driver that decides to implement the functionality. You can see the patch here.

We are still actively working on PgNext: The Next PostgreSQL Conference. The folks on …

We have been working on a large Oracle 8i conversion to PostgreSQL. Our customers were not concerned with the data conversion: there are tools like ora2pg and oracle foreign data wrapper to accomplish this. They do, however, have a significant number of queries that needs to be converted.

Apparently, most queries from Oracle and PostgreSQL look similar; after all, both are relational database systems, as opposed to Cassandra or MongoDB, …

This is something I have seen many times now: a customer calls us because they lost some data and they want help recovering.

Now you must be wondering: surely if they lost data they can just recover from their last backup, right? Right — they had that. However we know that pg_dump takes a while to run and is stressful on the server, so it's normally run just once a …

Come on, admit it: you've always wanted to display the infomask bits from a tuple header in a human-readable manner, but you've never gotten around to it and you still keep htup.h in display while you peek around tuples.

Fortunately, that time is now past! Here's a short and simple recipe to decode the bits for your reading pleasure. Gone is the htup.h cheat sheet. Here's what you need:

create …

West is wrapped up. It was smaller. We split the attendees between Postgres Open and Surge. It was a good conference. We received a lot of positive feedback and I was even able to be nice (stop laughing, just ask others :P) to people for the conference.

We were able to fund two features for PostgreSQL, both of which will hopefully hit for 9.2. The first is work to …