OmniPITR project that I wrote about some time ago is going on.
Just today I finished tests for omnipitr-backup-slave – part of OmniPITR which lets you make hot-backups of WAL-slave machine – without any additional load on master.
As previously – please download (svn co) and test. In case you have problems – please mail me or contact me on irc.freenode.net – I'm usually on #postgresql.
Today, Mattias|farm on IRC asked how to create primary key using HASH index. After some talk, he said that in some books it said that for “=" (equality) hash indexes are better.
So, I digged a bit deeper.
Every so often you might need to find a value regardless of which column it's in.
Of course not in application code, as this would be very slow. But you might be in situation where you just don't know where did application get some value from, and you want to find it in table. Table that has 1-2 fields is trivial to search, but if you have 15 columns, naming them all in WHERE clause is tedious.
Continue reading Tips N' Tricks – looking for value in all columns of a table
Relatively soon we will have 9.0, and we will move with development to 9.1 (we as in: PostgreSQL community, I don't know C so I can't help developing myself, but I will at least try to keep up with changes in the ‘Waiting for' series).
I have a mixed love/hate relationship with tests.
I hate writing them. I hate remembering to add them when I'm in the zone, and application code is flowing freely from the tips of my fingers.
But when I do add them, I absolutely love the ability to twist and replace the most core innards of application, and be able to tell that at least the sanity check of the code passes.
I love them even more when they prevent me for repeating some mistake/bug – i.e. when there is a bug, and I have tests (which clearly failed, as they didn't catch the bug), I add test for this specific bug, so I know that in future it will not happen again.
For a long time I've been fan of stored procedures (or functions) – of course not for everything, but where it makes sense.
Every now and then there is someone on IRC, mailing lists, or private contact which asks about rules.
My answer virtually always is: don't use rules. If you think that they solve your problem, think again. Why?
Continue reading To rule or not to rule – that is the question
Thanks to the company I work for OmniTI I was working on pretty cool project. Name of the project is OmniPITR, and here is what it is, why, how, and where to get it.
I mamy kolejny rant nt. podejścia do klienta. Tym razem na tapecie merlin.pl.
Continue reading Frontem do klienta – merlin.pl (polish only)
Today, there was this one person on IRC, which asked question and provided some data. While working on helping him (her?), I noticed some things, that bugged me before in other cases, but this time i decided to write about it – it's kind of rant, and if you (the reader) are the person that I'm basing my example on – please do not feel “punished" – it just so happens, that you exhibited some things that make helping others more difficult than it could be – so: you're not special, although I would really prefer if you were 🙂
Continue reading What mistakes you can avoid when looking for help on IRC?
On May, 12ve, Bruce Momjian committed new contrib module for 9.0 – pg_upgrage.
As I understand – this is what was available before as pg-migrator.
If you're not familiar with it – it's a tool that allows upgrade of $PGDATA from some version to some version. What's the use case? Let's assume you have this 200GB database working as 8.3, and you'd like to go to 8.4 (or 9.0). Normal way is pg_dump + pg_restore – which will take some time. With pg-migrate/pg_upgrade it should be faster, and easier. So, let's play with it.