Postgres and Open Source Experts

One of our customers who is using Ruby on Rails with the PostgreSQL database backend notified us of a long-standing issue with the database driver: Lighthouse ticket #3721

The driver is doing something that at first glance looks like a smart thing, but apparently it's not that smart. What it does is it tries to detect the bit-string notation (binary vs. hexadecimal) based on the string content passed …

It was rather puzzling to me why Redmine doesn't come with a Pastebin module and why there's no plugin for that.

One of the proposed "solutions" is to start a new wiki page, and put some <code> markup there. While this seems to work, it has some limitations a real pastebin component wouldn't suffer from. First thing that comes to mind is that you need a unique name to …

Last week, a company's only PostgreSQL database server suffered an UPS failure. When they found they couldn't connect to it afterwards, they called Command Prompt to investigate.

The most important lesson to be learned here is: you need to make very sure you have backups. Even if the strategy is too simple, or even if they are taken only once a fortnight, they are going to save your …

I arrived at the New Yorker yesterday to find that it was an excellent choice for our attendees to sleep. In the last couple of years they have renovated all the rooms and the hotel is quite nice. I have a double and will be here the next 12 days, yes that means I will be here on St. Patrick's day. For all those PostgreSQL Peeps that have never been …

With #PgEast just two weeks away I have been looking for every possible place that I can to advocate the conference. In doing so, I have been finding lots of interesting tidbits of information. For example, did you know (per Stefan/Mastermind) PostgreSQL is lucky to reach 15k tps per core for SIMPLE QUERIES, whereas MySQL can do upward of 30k tps per core for SIMPLE QUERIES? There is …

The session schedule is now up. We also have a new twitter account for the conference. Further, EFF has also offered a discounted membership for #PgEast attendees, more information can be found here. Of course you can register in full here.

The training (not sessions) schedule is up for #PgEast trainings. You can get it right off the front page. We are running 7 sessions in parallel with a total of 9 trainings.

It all started with a help request from a someone on IRC: he has about 2500 roles, and all of them have been granted USAGE privileges on a schema. He went on to create a bunch more and grant the same privilege, but it failed:

CREATE ROLE some_user_2501; GRANT USAGE on schema genetics to some_user_2501; ERROR: row is too big: size 8168, maximum size 8164

Oops.

Now, …

It is 21 days to PostgreSQL Conference East (#PgEast), which is set once again to break attendance records of all the western world conferences. Hosted in NYC, we have large number of sessions, over 60 speakers, a full day of trainings, an excellent NYCPug meeting at the event, and an excessive number of sponsors (nahh... we need 3x more, sponsors ROCK!). I am truly humbled at the amazing level of …

I have been disappointed for a long time with the way PL/Perl handles array arguments. For example, let's consider a simple Perl function that takes a value and a list and checks whether the value is present in the list.

CREATE FUNCTION check_values { my $val = shift; my $aref = shift; foreach (@$aref) { return true if $val eq $_ } return false; }

A practical use …