It surely does not feel like a full month and some more went by since we were enjoying PGCon 2010, but in fact it was already the time for CHAR(10). The venue was most excellent, as Oxford is a very beautiful city. Also, the college was like a city in the city, and having the accomodation all in there really smoothed it all.

On a more technical viewpoint, the range of topics we talked about and the even broader one in the “Hall Track” make my mind full of ideas, again. So I’m preparing a quite lengthy article to summarise or present all those ideas, and I think a post series should cover the points in there. When trying to label things, it appears that my current obsessions are mainly about PostgreSQL in the Cloud and Further Optimising PostgreSQL, so that’s what I’ll be talking about those next days.

Meanwhile I’m going to search for existing solutions on how to use the Paxos algorithm to generate a reliable distributed sequence, using libpaxos for example. The goal would be to see if it’s feasible to have a way to offer some global XID from a network of servers in a distributed fashion, ideally in such a way that new members can join in at any point, and of course that losing a member does not cause downtime for the online ones. It sounds like this problem has been extensively researched and is solved, either by the Global Communication Systems or the underlying algorithms. Given the current buy-in lack of our community for GCS my guess is that bypassing them would be a pretty good move, even if that mean implementing a limited form of GCS ourselves.