This time the changes do not modify how the website works. But they make it simpler to deploy clone of explain.depesz.com on your own server.
Thanks to Petr A. Korobeinikov I got full automation for setting test/development/internal clones of the site. What was done previously manually, now can be done very fast using Vagrant or Puppet.
Great stuff, thanks Petr.
Continue reading Changes in explain.depesz.com
On 15th of December, Heikki Linnakangas committed patch:
Add point <-> polygon distance operator. Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Emre Hasegeli.
Continue reading Waiting for 9.5 – Add point <-> polygon distance operator.
On 8th of December, Simon Riggs committed patch:
REINDEX SCHEMA Add new SCHEMA option to REINDEX and reindexdb. Sawada Masahiko Reviewed by Michael Paquier and Fabrízio de Royes Mello
On 7th of December, Simon Riggs committed patch:
Event Trigger for table_rewrite Generate a table_rewrite event when ALTER TABLE attempts to rewrite a table. Provide helper functions to identify table and reason. Intended use case is to help assess or to react to schema changes that might hold exclusive locks for long periods. Dimitri Fontaine, triggering an edit by Simon Riggs Reviewed in detail by Michael Paquier
Continue reading Waiting for 9.5 – Event Trigger for table_rewrite
The general knowledge is that numerics are slower than integers/float, but offer precision and ranges that are better.
While I understand what is slow, I don't really know how much slower numerics are. So let's test it.
During my time with PostgreSQL I found some things that I love. I found some things that I hate (very little of them). And some things that I would like to get, but, so far, I don't have them.
Of course, PostgreSQL being Open Source, I could add it myself, if only I would know some (real) C and had necessary skills. Which I don't. But anyway, decided to write my personal wishlist for PostgreSQL – maybe someone will say “hey, that would be cool, and I know how to write it" 🙂
On 25th of November, Tom Lane committed patch:
Support arrays as input to array_agg() and ARRAY(SELECT ...). These cases formerly failed with errors about "could not find array type for data type". Now they yield arrays of the same element type and one higher dimension. The implementation involves creating functions with API similar to the existing accumArrayResult() family. I (tgl) also extended the base family by adding an initArrayResult() function, which allows callers to avoid special-casing the zero-inputs case if they just want an empty array as result. (Not all do, so the previous calling convention remains valid.) This allowed simplifying some existing code in xml.c and plperl.c. Ali Akbar, reviewed by Pavel Stehule, significantly modified by me
Continue reading Waiting for 9.5 – Support arrays as input to array_agg() and ARRAY(SELECT …).
On 11th of November, Fujii Masao committed patch:
Add generate_series(numeric, numeric). Платон Малюгин Reviewed by Michael Paquier, Ali Akbar and Marti Raudsepp
Continue reading Waiting for 9.5 – Add generate_series(numeric, numeric).
This is not about PostgreSQL, or programming, or even computers. It's about board game. Be warned.
On 7th of November, Alvaro Herrera committed patch:
BRIN is a new index access method intended to accelerate scans of very large tables, without the maintenance overhead of btrees or other traditional indexes. They work by maintaining "summary" data about block ranges. Bitmap index scans work by reading each summary tuple and comparing them with the query quals; all pages in the range are returned in a lossy TID bitmap if the quals are consistent with the values in the summary tuple, otherwise not. Normal index scans are not supported because these indexes do not store TIDs. As new tuples are added into the index, the summary information is updated (if the block range in which the tuple is added is already summarized) or not; in the latter case, a subsequent pass of VACUUM or the brin_summarize_new_values() function will create the summary information. For data types with natural 1-D sort orders, the summary info consists of the maximum and the minimum values of each indexed column within each page range. This type of operator class we call "Minmax", and we supply a bunch of them for most data types with B-tree opclasses. Since the BRIN code is generalized, other approaches are possible for things such as arrays, geometric types, ranges, etc; even for things such as enum types we could do something different than minmax with better results. In this commit I only include minmax. Catalog version bumped due to new builtin catalog entries. There's more that could be done here, but this is a good step forwards. Loosely based on ideas from Simon Riggs; code mostly by Álvaro Herrera, with contribution by Heikki Linnakangas. Patch reviewed by: Amit Kapila, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas. Testing help from Jeff Janes, Erik Rijkers, Emanuel Calvo. PS: The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 318633.
Continue reading Waiting for 9.5 – BRIN: Block Range Indexes.