Last week I had the pleasure to present two talks at the awesome PostgreSQL Conference Europe. The first one was actually a tutorial about Writing & using Postgres Extensions where we spent 3 hours on what are PostgreSQL Extensions, what you can expect from them, and how to develop a new one. Then I also had the opportunity to present the new version of pgloader in a talk about Migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

At the Open World Forum two weeks ago I had the pleasure to meet with Colin Charles. We had a nice talk about the current state of both MariaDB and PostgreSQL, and even were both interviewed by the Open World Forum Team. The interview is now available online. Dear French readers, it’s in English. Here’s the video: Executive Summary: MariaDB is a drop-in fully Open Source replacement for MySQL and sees quite some progress and innovation being made, and PostgreSQL is YeSQL!

PostgreSQL is an all round impressive Relational DataBase Management System which implements the SQL standard (see the very useful reference page Comparison of different SQL implementations for details). PostgreSQL also provides with unique solutions in the database market and has been leading innovation for some years now. Still, there’s no support for Autonomous Transactions within the server itself. Let’s have a look at how to easily implement them with PL/Proxy.

Last Friday I had the chance to be speaking at the Open World Forum in the NewSQL track, where we had lots of interest and excitement around the NoSQL offerings. Of course, my talk was about explaining how PostgreSQL is Web Scale with some historical background and technical examples about what this database engine is currently capable of. *PostgreSQL is Web Scale. PostgreSQL is YeSQL!* The conclusion of the talk is that indeed, PostgreSQL is YeSQL!

In our previous article about Loading Geolocation Data, we did load some data into PostgreSQL and saw the quite noticable impact of a user transformation. As it happens, the function that did the integer to IP representation was so naive as to scratch the micro optimisation itch of some Common Lisp hackers: thanks a lot guys, in particular stassats who came up with the solution we’re seeing now.

As I’ve been mentionning in the past already, I’m currently rewriting pgloader from scratch in Common Lisp. In terms of technical debt that’s akin to declaring bankrupcy, which is both sad news and good news as there’s suddenly new hope of doing it right this time.