Why does “sudo ls -l /proc/1/fd/*” fail?

I usually write about PostgreSQL, but lately someone asked for help, and one of the problems was similar to sudo command from title.

This was not the first time I saw it, so figured, I'll write a blogpost about it, just so I can refer people to it in the future.

Continue reading Why does “sudo ls -l /proc/1/fd/*" fail?

Waiting for PostgreSQL 10 – Logical replication

On 20th of January, Peter Eisentraut committed patch:

Logical replication
 
- Add PUBLICATION catalogs and DDL
- Add SUBSCRIPTION catalog and DDL
- Define logical replication protocol and output plugin
- Add logical replication workers
 
From: Petr Jelinek
Reviewed-by: Steve Singer
Reviewed-by: Andres Freund
Reviewed-by: Erik Rijkers
Reviewed-by: Peter Eisentraut

Continue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 10 – Logical replication

Waiting for PostgreSQL 10 – Add pg_sequence system catalog

On 20th of December, Peter Eisentraut committed patch:

Add pg_sequence system catalog
 
Move sequence metadata (start, increment, etc.) into a proper system
catalog instead of storing it in the sequence heap object.  This
separates the metadata from the sequence data.  Sequence metadata is now
operated on transactionally by DDL commands, whereas previously
rollbacks of sequence-related DDL commands would be ignored.
 
Reviewed-by: Andreas Karlsson

Continue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 10 – Add pg_sequence system catalog

Generate short, random, textual IDs

Couple of people asked, on irc, about how to generate unique, short, ids for rows.

Since I wrote code for this for explain.depesz.com, I figured that instead of pointing to sources, and letting everyone to extract the functions, I will, instead, write a set of functions that what is needed in reusable way.

Continue reading Generate short, random, textual IDs

Waiting for PostgreSQL 10 – Implement table partitioning.

I had two month delay related to some work, but now I can finally write about:

On 7th of December, Robert Haas committed patch:

Implement table partitioning.
 
Table partitioning is like table inheritance and reuses much of the
existing infrastructure, but there are some important differences.
The parent is called a partitioned table and is always empty; it may
not have indexes or non-inherited constraints, since those make no
sense for a relation with no data of its own.  The children are called
partitions and contain all of the actual data.  Each partition has an
implicit partitioning constraint.  Multiple inheritance is not
allowed, and partitioning and inheritance can't be mixed.  Partitions
can't have extra columns and may not allow nulls unless the parent
does.  Tuples inserted into the parent are automatically routed to the
correct partition, so tuple-routing ON INSERT triggers are not needed.
Tuple routing isn't yet supported for partitions which are foreign
tables, and it doesn't handle updates that cross partition boundaries.
 
Currently, tables can be range-partitioned or list-partitioned.  List
partitioning is limited to a single column, but range partitioning can
involve multiple columns.  A partitioning "column" can be an
expression.
 
Because table partitioning is less general than table inheritance, it
is hoped that it will be easier to reason about properties of
partitions, and therefore that this will serve as a better foundation
for a variety of possible optimizations, including query planner
optimizations.  The tuple routing based which this patch does based on
the implicit partitioning constraints is an example of this, but it
seems likely that many other useful optimizations are also possible.
 
Amit Langote, reviewed and tested by Robert Haas, Ashutosh Bapat,
Amit Kapila, Rajkumar Raghuwanshi, Corey Huinker, Jaime Casanova,
Rushabh Lathia, Erik Rijkers, among others.  Minor revisions by me.

Continue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 10 – Implement table partitioning.

Major-version upgrading with minimal downtime

There is this idea that from 9.5 we will be able to upgrade pg clusters to newer, major, version, without downtime (well, almost), thanks to magic of logical replication.

Sounds very promising, so I figured – I'll test it. To some extent at least.

Continue reading Major-version upgrading with minimal downtime

Waiting for PostgreSQL 10 – postgres_fdw: Push down aggregates to remote servers.

On 21st of October, Robert Haas committed patch:

postgres_fdw: Push down aggregates to remote servers.
 
Now that the upper planner uses paths, and now that we have proper hooks
to inject paths into the upper planning process, it's possible for
foreign data wrappers to arrange to push aggregates to the remote side
instead of fetching all of the rows and aggregating them locally.  This
figures to be a massive win for performance, so teach postgres_fdw to
do it.
 
Jeevan Chalke and Ashutosh Bapat.  Reviewed by Ashutosh Bapat with
additional testing by Prabhat Sahu.  Various mostly cosmetic changes
by me.

Continue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 10 – postgres_fdw: Push down aggregates to remote servers.

Waiting for PostgreSQL 10 – Rename “pg_xlog” directory to “pg_wal”.

On 20th of October, Robert Haas committed patch:

Rename "pg_xlog" directory to "pg_wal".
 
"xlog" is not a particularly clear abbreviation for "write-ahead log",
and it sometimes confuses users into believe that the contents of the
"pg_xlog" directory are not critical data, leading to unpleasant
consequences.  So, rename the directory to "pg_wal".
 
This patch modifies pg_upgrade and pg_basebackup to understand both
the old and new directory layouts; the former is necessary given the
purpose of the tool, while the latter merely avoids an unnecessary
backward-compatibility break.
 
We may wish to consider renaming other programs, switches, and
functions which still use the old "xlog" naming to also refer to
"wal".  However, that's still under discussion, so let's do just this
much for now.
 
Discussion: CAB7nPqTeC-8+zux8_-4ZD46V7YPwooeFxgndfsq5Rg8ibLVm1A@mail.gmail.com
 
Michael Paquier

discussion link

Continue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 10 – Rename “pg_xlog" directory to “pg_wal".

Missing waiting for …. ?

It looks that for some reason my subscription to pgsql-committers disappeared, and I stopped receiving mails from this list.

I also didn't notice it, for some time – not sure when it got lost.

I did resubscribed now, but if you can think of any specific commits that I should have written about, but haven't, please let me know, and I'll write about it. Sorry for the problem.

Getting list of unique elements in table, per group

Today, on irc, someone asked interesting question.

Basically she ran a query like:

SELECT a, b, c, d, e, f FROM TABLE ORDER BY a

then, she processed the query to get, for each a array of unique values of b, c, d, e, and f, and then he inserted it back to database, to some other table.

It was a problem, because the table had many rows (millions I would assume), and the whole process was slow.

So, how to make it faster?

Continue reading Getting list of unique elements in table, per group