What if you could turn
thousands of lines of code into
simple queries?

Another day, another migration from MySQL to PostgreSQL… or at least that’s how it feels sometimes. This time again I’ve been using some quite old scripts to help me do the migration.

This article is about versions 2.x of pgloader, which are not supported anymore. Consider using pgloader version 3.x instead. You won’t need to generate the configuration anymore as pgloader now connects to a live instance of the source database and query its system catalogs for you.


I wrote a book!


In a recent article titled Inline Extensions we detailed the problem of how to distribute an extension’s package to a remote server without having access to its file system at all. The solution to that problem is non trivial, let’s say. But thanks to the awesome PostgreSQL Community we finaly have some practical ideas on how to address the problem as discussed on pgsql-hackers, our development mailing list. *PostgreSQL is first an Awesome Community* The solution we talked about is to use templates, and so I’ve been working on a patch to bring templates for extensions to PostgreSQL.


We’ve been having the CREATE EXTENSION feature in PostgreSQL for a couple of releases now, so let’s talk about how to go from here. The first goal of the extension facility has been to allow for a clean dump and restore process of contrib modules. As such it’s been tailored to the needs of deploying files on the file system because there’s no escaping from that when you have to ship binary and executable files, those infamous .


I’ve been asked about how to integrate the ack tool (you know, the one that is better than grep) into Emacs today. Again. And I just realized that I didn’t blog about my solution. That might explain why I keep getting asked about it after all… So here it is, M-x ack: ;;; dim-ack.el --- Dimitri Fontaine ;; ;; http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2322389/ack-does-not-work-when-run-from-grep-find-in-emacs-on-windows (defcustom ack-command (or (executable-find "ack") (executable-find "ack-grep")) "Command to use to call ack, e.


A while ago I stumbled upon Happy Numbers as explained in programming praxis, and offered an implementation of them in SQL and in Emacs Lisp. Yeah, I know. Why not, though? Today I’m back on that topic and as I’m toying with Common Lisp I though it would be a good excuse to learn me some new tricks. As you can see from the earlier blog entry, last time I did attack the digits problem quite lightly.


About Vimgolf

Following some tweet I found myself desultory watching an episode of the awesome VimGolf in Emacs video series by Tim Visher. Those series are about picking some challenge from vimgolf and implementing it with our favorite editor instead. Because Emacs Rocks guys. Let me tell you upfront that I really dislike the whole idea of the vim golf challenge. I’ve been a user of both Emacs and Vim for many years, and finally decided to switch to living in Emacs; or if you prefer, climbing my way up from level 2 as in The Levels Of Emacs Proficiency.

Dimitri Fontaine

PostgreSQL Major Contributor

Open Source Software Engineer

France