Category “PostgreSQL” — 131 articles

There’s currently a thread on hackers about bg worker: overview and a series of 6 patches. Thanks a lot Markus! This is all about generalizing a concept already in use in the autovacuum process, where you have an independent subsystem that require having an autonomous daemon running and able to start its own workers. I’ve been advocating about generalizing this concept for awhile already, in order to have postmaster able to communicate to subsystems when to shut down and start and reload, etc.

Nowadays to analyze logs and provide insights, the more common tool to use is pgfouine, which does an excellent job. But there has been some improvements in logs capabilities that we’re not benefiting from yet, and I’m thinking about the CSV log format. So the idea would be to turn pgfouine into a set of SQL queries against the logs themselves once imported into the database. Wait. What about having our next PostgreSQL version, which is meant (I believe) to include CSV support in SQL/MED, to directly expose its logs as a system view?

There’s a big trend nowadays about using column storage as opposed to what PostgreSQL is doing, which would be row storage. The difference is that if you have the same column value in a lot of rows, you could get to a point where you have this value only once in the underlying storage file. That means high compression. Then you tweak the executor to be able to load this value only once, not once per row, and you win another huge source of data traffic (often enough, from disk).

This year’s edition has been the best pgcon ever for me. Granted, it’s only my third time, but still :) As Josh said the “Hall Track” in particular was very good, and the Dev Meeting has been very effective! Extensions This time I prepared some slides to present the extension design and I tried hard to make it so that we get to agree on a plan, even recognizing it’s not solving all of our problems from the get go.

This time we’re having a database where sequences were used, but not systematically as a default value of a given column. It’s mainly an historic bad idea, but you know the usual excuse with bad ideas and bad code: the first 6 months it’s experimental, after that it’s historic. *Not talking about genome orphaned sequences here, though* Still, here’s a query for 8.4 that will allow you to list those sequences you have that are not used as a default value in any of your tables: