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Postgres Bug Tracking - Help Wanted!

By Greg Sabino Mullane
May 29, 2011

Once again there is talk in the Postgres community about adopting the use of a bug tracker. The latest thread, on pgsql-hackers, was started by someone asking about the status of their patch. Or rather, asking an even better meta-question about how one finds out the status of a PostgreSQL bug report or patch. Sadly, the answer is that there is no standard way, other than sending emails until someone replies one way or another. The current process works something like this:

1. Someone finds a bug1. They send an email to pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org OR they use the web form, which grabs a sequential number and mails the report to pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org. Nothing else is done/stored, it just sends the email.1. Someone replies about the bug OR nobody replies about the bug.1. After a fix is found, which may involve some emails on other mailing lists, someone replies that the bug is fixed on the original thread. Maybe.

As you can see, there is some room for improvement there. Some of the most major and glaring holes in the current system:

• No way to search previous / existing bugs
• No way to tell the status of a bug
• No way to categorize and group bugs (per version, per platform, per …

End Point to be at Internet Retailer 2011

By Steph Skardal
May 27, 2011

We’re excited to announce that End Point will be in full force at Internet Retailer 2011. A team of six (Rick, Ben, Jon, Ron, Carl, and myself) will be managing a booth during the 3 day Conference and Exhibition in San Diego from June 14th-17th.

We’re hoping to reach out to future clients to discuss our services including ecommerce develpoment and support, database development and support, systems architecture, hosting, and Liquid Galaxy build, maintenance and support. We’ll also have a Liquid Galaxy display to show off as part of our exhibit. We have a couple of conference passes so hopefully we’ll attend a few sessions and share some details about those sessions here on our blog!

Please come by our booth at the conference to meet us or to say hi! We’re excited to talk to you about what we can do to help your business succeed.

Spree Performance Benchmarking

By Steph Skardal
May 25, 2011

I see a lot of questions regarding Spree performance in the spree-user group, but they are rarely answered with metrics. I put together a quick script using the generic benchmark tool ab to review some data. Obviously, the answer to how well a site performs and scales is highly dependent on the host and the consumption of the web application, so the data here needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Another thing to note is that only two of the following use cases are running on Rails 3.0 — many of our current Spree clients are on Spree 0.11.2 or older. I also included one non-Spree Rails ecommerce application, in addition to a few non-Rails applications for comparison. All of the tests were run from my home network, so in theory there shouldn’t be bias on performance tests for sites running on End Point servers.

Raising open file descriptor limits for Dovecot and nginx

By Jon Jensen
May 23, 2011

Recently we’ve needed to increase some limits in two excellent open-source servers: Dovecot, for IMAP and POP email service, and nginx, for HTTP/HTTPS web service. These are running on different servers, both using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

First, let’s look at Dovecot. We have a somewhat busy mail server and as it grew busier, it occasionally hit connection limits when the server itself still has plenty of available capacity.

Raising the number of processes in Dovecot is easy. Edit /etc/dovecot.conf and change from the prior (now commented-out) limits to the new limits:

#login_max_processes_count = 128
login_max_processes_count = 512

and later in the file:

#max_mail_processes = 512
max_mail_processes = 2048

However, then Dovecot won’t start at all due to a shortage of available file descriptors. There are various ways to change that, including munging the init scripts, changing the system defaults, etc. The most standard and non-interventive way to do so with this RHEL 5 Dovecot RPM package is to edit /etc/sysconfig/dovecot and add:

ulimit -n 131072

That sets the shell’s maximum number of open file descriptors allowed in the init script /etc/init.d/dovecot before the Dovecot …

Coding Tips from RailsConf 2011

By Steph Skardal
May 20, 2011

A couple of the sessions I attended on Day 1 of RailsConf 2011 were along the lines of how to write good Rails code: Keeping Rails on the Tracks by Mikel Lindsaar and Confident Code by Avdi Grimm. Here’s a mishmash summary from these talks. Although the talks didn’t focus on Ruby and Rails techniques, both talks had plenty of examples and tips for writing maintainable code that apply to my world of consulting and development.

In the first talk, Mikel talked about what he meant by keeping Rails on the Tracks and the balance that we might often experience between just working code and sexy code. Maintainable code lands in the middle there somewhere. And he briefly touched on the fact that budget matters in writing maintainable code, trade-offs are part of life, and that you are selling a solution and not code, which means that clients don’t really care about the technology as long as it’s maintainable.

Mikel’s first pro tip for building a maintainable Rails app is to treat deployment as a first class citizen by having trivial deployment that takes advantage of existing tools like Chef and Puppet. Using Bundler will help you avoid additional pain, but be careful of avoiding locking …

JavaScript and APIs at RailsConf 2011

By Steph Skardal
May 19, 2011

A big trend of RailsConf 2011 has been the presence of JavaScript, whether it be talk of CoffeeScript, node.js, Sproutcore, backbone.js, etc. I attended Yehuda Katz’s talk on Building Rails Apps for the Rich Client on Day 4 of the conference.

Part 1: Rails versus Sinatra Smackdown

Yehuda gave a two part talk about developing API-heavy applications. The first bit addressed why to develop in Rails rather than Sinatra if your application is API-heavy and doesn’t appear to be utilizing valuable parts of Rails? This is fairly applicable to a couple of Sinatra projects that I’ve done at End Point — I like Sinatra a lot, but at some point you begin to replicate parts of Rails. Yehuda explained that because it’s easy to develop web applications efficiently using Rails conventions, developers can become forgetful/ignorant of the underlying functionality of Rails that doesn’t ship with something like Sinatra, much like how working with an ORM can breed developers who aren’t familiar with the underlying database interactions. The checklist for things that Rails manages we might forget about includes:

• ActionDispatch internals
• Session deserialization
• Browser standards mode
• Cookie abstraction …

Only Try This At Home

By Josh Williams
May 19, 2011

Taken by Josh 6 years to the day before the release of 9.1 beta 1

For the record, 9.1 is gearing up to be an awesome release. I was tinkering and testing PostgreSQL 9.1 Beta 1 (… You are beta testing, too, right?) … and some of the new PL/Python features caught my eye. These are minor among all the really cool high profile features, to be sure. But it made me think back to a little bit of experimental code written some time ago, and how these couple language additions could make a big difference.

For one reason or another I’d just hit the top level postgresql.org website, and suddenly realized just how many Postgres databases it took to put together what I was seeing on the screen. Not only does it power the content database that generated the page, of course, but even the lookup of the .org went through Afilias and their Postgres-backed domain service. It’s a pity the DBMS couldn’t act as the middle layer between those.

Or could it?

That’s a shortened form of it just for demonstration purposes (the original one had things like a table browser) … but it works. For example, on this test 9.1 install, hit http://localhost:8000/public/webtest and the following …

Sass at RailsConf 2011

By Steph Skardal
May 18, 2011

With the inclusion of the Scss gem in Rails 3.1, RailsConf is a nice time to get a refresher on Sass/Scss functionality. Sass defines itself as syntactically awesome stylesheets, or a CSS meta language built to provide more powerful functionality to manipulate website appearances with efficiency and elegance. Note that Sass has two syntaxes and the examples presented in this article use the newer Scss syntax. Around the time of RailsConf two years ago, Sass was a included in Spree, an open-source Ruby on Rails ecommerce framework that End Point supports. At the time, I was skeptical about Sass inclusion in Spree because it wasn’t being leveraged to it’s full potential and had hopes of taking advantage of Sass, but a few months later it was removed from the core. Since then, I haven’t worked with Sass on other projects but hope to do so moving forward after being reminded of it’s features and of the fact that it will be included in Rails 3.1 as a default. I attended Chris Eppstein’s talk on Sass and explain a few features related to real-life use cases of CSS manipulation.

Variables

While working on a new feature, your client says, “I want this to be the same red that we use all …