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PostgreSQL and Financial Calculations - Part Two

The second in a series of blogs covering common mistakes in Database and Application designs for financial calculations.

Inconsistent precision scaling:

This is probably the most common mistake in database design that I observe. It is understood to use exact data types (such as numeric) and the precision must be fixed, but for whatever reason the decision is made that it’s OK for one table to use numeric(12,4),a second table …

Recent blog updates

When you have been around as long as Command Prompt, you are bound to forget blogs you wrote as well as the fact that those blogs are likely exceedingly outdated. I was recently doing a review of the Command Prompt Dead Sea Scrolls and have come across two that we have updated to be accurate for the modern times of PostgreSQL.

The blogs

Postgres, where art thou?

In the 2017 article we referenced to /r/postgresql which at the time had 5,100 members. It now has 25.5k. In the same time period as pgsql-general, it generated 175 messages among community members (20 posts, 155 responses). Similarly, we mentioned the Slack channel which at the time had 1100+ members. It now hosts 18.3k subscribers with similar activity of the subreddit. The People, Postgres, Data Discord, which did not exist in 2017, has 3,579 members and is quite active over its 28 channels. The listed collaboration venues don’t take into account the thousands of members among the international or associated (Brazil, Russia, TimescaleDB, Yugabyte, NeonDB, etc…) Postgres communities.

PostgresConf Silicon Valley 2022, anticipated talks

On Thursday and Friday of this week we will be enjoying 90 degree weather and sunshine in San Jose, California. It will be quite the change from the dark and damp of NW Washington. This is also the first time I will have been on an airplane in almost 3 years. Yes, it really has been that long since the world decided to begin a pandemic. That said, I am …

When is it time to fire a client?

Over the last 25 years we have interviewed hundreds of people to be a part of our team. As with any good interview, you allow candidates to ask questions about the business, how you operate, what your philosophy looks like, and hopefully what your plan for the future is. My favorite is, “What is something you tell every employee?” Our answer is always the same, “We are never afraid to fire a client” and the response is almost universally “that’s refreshing.”

Mark Porter: CTO MongoDB on PostgreSQL and MongoDB

I had an opportunity to sit down with Mark Porter, the CTO of MongoDB to discuss PostgreSQL, Aurora PostgreSQL and MongoDB. Mark is one of the creators of Aurora PostgreSQL and now enjoys a leadership role at MongoDB. There are two episodes:

It is important to reach out to leaders in communities to understand how they succeed. Mark has over 30 years of experience in …

August PostgresWorld Webinars

As North America starts to reopen, the PostgresWorld webinar series continues to provide exceptional free content to the community. See below for the August webinars.

What makes a Postgres contributor?

In many Open Source communities it is difficult to consider who a contributor is. Some projects take an exclusive view, requiring a direct contribution to be made to be considered a contributor. Looking at this holistically, we find that the success of a project is found only when there is a mutual connection between the hands-on team and those who support it.Without that connection, PostgreSQL would just be a fever …

Episode Four and Five of: More than a refresh available

A couple of our recent podcasts are directly related to PostgreSQL, they are listed below. I have really enjoyed meeting the people behind the technology that drives PostgreSQL in the global community. A lot of us are used to collectively gathering a few times a year with conferences. Obviously the pandemic has put a halt to that but launching the podcast has allowed me to connect with some amazing folks.

Reverse DNS Zones With AWS Simple AD

Consider a fairly complex design of a DNS service in AWS cloud: one that includes native AWS Route 53, AWS Simple AD and traditional BIND service running on EC2 instances to cater to different needs of development and production environments in terms of serving DNS requests and providing directory services.

All EC2 hosts in one of your production VPCs are pointed to Simple AD DNS servers that are your primary …