Author: depesz

How to get list of elements from multiranges?

So, some time ago, Pg devs added multi ranges – that is datatype that can be used to store multiple ranges in single column.

The thing is that it wasn't really simple how to get list of ranges from within such multirange. There was no operator, no way to split it.

A month ago Alexander Korotkov committed patch that added unnest() over multiranges, but it got some problems, and was reverted

It will eventually made it's way into sources, I assume, but in the mean time – a friend of mine asked how to get list of elements from multiranges. So I looked into it.

Continue reading How to get list of elements from multiranges?

Buffers I/O information on explain.depesz.com

I just released first version of change to explain.depesz.com that displays buffer I/O information, as described recently.

You can see it in here.

There are two new columns in there, showing how much data given node read from disk, and how much it wrote.

It's definitely not 100% OK now, as you can see, speed and time is not always there, but generally it should work.

There is also summarized info in stats page of the explain.

If you'd notice anything wrong, please let me know, either by mail, or just make an issue on GitLab.

A tale of making company-wide standard psqlrc

At a company we have literally thousands of Pg servers. The layout is also kinda non-obvious. Each database is named the same, but contains different data. And in front of it all, we have pgbouncers.

After some talk, it was suggested that perhaps we could make psql prompt show which database it is connected to. And perhaps some more information, like backend pid. I thought it will be simple…

Continue reading A tale of making company-wide standard psqlrc

Many changes on explain.depesz.com

Some time ago Eugen Konkov mailed me that he'd like to have some changes on explain.depesz.com.

One of the changes was actual bug, but the rest were improvements to functionality.

I kinda didn't want to do it, but when I looked closer it appeared to me that there are some subtle bugs, and when I'll be fixing them, I can add some of the things Eugen requested:

Continue reading Many changes on explain.depesz.com

Million explain plans…

Back in 2007 I wrote a simple script to add total time to explain analyze output.

It was very helpful, for me.

Then, around a year later figured that it could be useful for others, so wrote a simple site that got plans, and displayed them with extra info. It didn't look great.

Two years later I figured it would be good to make it look nicer. Asked a friend – Łukasz Lewandowski about it, and together we made new version, that was easier on eyes.

Since then there were no layout changes, just some new functionality: deleting plans, anonymizing/obfuscating them, user accounts, plan stats.

The site seemed to catch. In the first month (December of 2008) there were 391 plans added. Almost exactly 10 years later, in October 2018, we got 394 plans added, on average, each day.

Lately the average daily count of new plans (monthly average) is 400-550.

The best day was 21st of February 2019 where we got 5320 new plans. Most likely due to link to site being posted on some news aggregator or forum.

And, just yesterday, at around 4:30pm UTC, there was millionth plan pasted.

That is amazing and I would like to thank all of you – it really brightens my day when I see that people are using the site, and it (hopefully) helps them.

Getting value from dynamic column in pl/PgSQL triggers?

Every so often, on irc, someone asks how to get value from column that is passed as argument.

This is generally seen as not possible, as pl/PgSQL doesn't have support for dynamic column names.

We can work around it, though. Are the workarounds usable, in terms of performance?

Continue reading Getting value from dynamic column in pl/PgSQL triggers?

Changes on explain.depesz.com – extracted query from auto-explain plans

Some time ago James Courtney reported missing functionality.

Specifically, when one uses auto-explain, logged explains contain query text. So, when such explain is then pasted on explain.depesz.com, it stands to reason that it should be able to extract the query on its own, without having to manually extract it and put it in query box.

It took me a while, but finally, got it working today. And you can see it in all four explain format:

Also, while I'm writing – it seems that somewhere next month, there will be 1 millionth plan uploaded to the site 🙂 Hope you all find it useful 🙂

Waiting for PostgreSQL 14 – Add unistr function

On 29th of March 2021, Peter Eisentraut committed patch:

Add unistr function
 
This allows decoding a string with Unicode escape sequences.  It is
similar to Unicode escape strings, but offers some more flexibility.
 
Author: Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Asif Rehman <asifr.rehman@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAFj8pRA5GnKT+gDVwbVRH2ep451H_myBt+NTz8RkYUARE9+qOQ@mail.gmail.com

Continue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 14 – Add unistr function

Waiting for PostgreSQL 14 – Add “pg_database_owner” default role.

On 26th of March 2021, Noah Misch committed patch:

Add "pg_database_owner" default role.
 
Membership consists, implicitly, of the current database owner.  Expect
use in template databases.  Once pg_database_owner has rights within a
template, each owner of a database instantiated from that template will
exercise those rights.
 
Reviewed by John Naylor.
 
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20201228043148.GA1053024@rfd.leadboat.com

Continue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 14 – Add “pg_database_owner" default role.