PgCon: Preparing the keynote, more talks and today is Developer Meeting day
By Selena Deckelmann
May 20, 2009
I spent most of Tuesday polishing up slides for my VACUUM strategy talk, reviewing the Power psql talk slides, working a little bit and then meeting up with all the new arrivals.
Dave Page and Greg Stark rescued Magnus and I from the coffee shop and we settled in at the Royal Oak for the evening. Dave, Magnus and I decided on the theme “Why people are choosing Postgres” for our keynote, and we managed to produce a few slides to guide us!
Peter Eisentraut was there and I chatted briefly about his fun FUSE project for Postgres that he’ll be giving a Lightning Talk about on Friday. (There is still time to give a lightning talk, by the way! Find me, or just update the wiki and I’ll add you to the agenda.)
I also saw CB (one of the database gurus) from Etsy there, and I’m hoping to meet up with him and a few more people this evening. Tom Lane and I chatted a little bit about my experience at MySQL Conference, and how things seem to be going with Drizzle.
All in all, had a great evening and I even survived Dave’s frequent refilling of my beer glass. I’m looking forward to today’s Developer Meeting.
conference postgres
PGCon: First day in Ottawa
By Selena Deckelmann
May 19, 2009
I arrived in Ottawa late Sunday night a little in advance of the conference. I’m spending a couple days working on the final bits of my slides, and spending a little time with friends in the Postgres community that I only get to see once a year!
I started the morning with Dan Langille, the PGCon organizer, Magnus Hagander, and Josh Berkus. During that conversation, I managed to avoid being assigned to give the keynote on Thursday by myself, but instead enlisted Magnus and Dave Page to come up with something together with me. They gave a keynote together at PgDay EU, so I figured I would be in good company.
One project that I’ve helped with in the past is the code that runs planet.postgresql.org. Magnus Hagander and I spent most of yesterday renaming the project, identifying the next few features we’d like to add, and getting the source tree moved over to git.postgresql.org.
I’m hoping we have a little more time between tweaking slides to get our new features finished and deployed to the production server today.
conference postgres
Competitors to Bucardo version 1
By Jon Jensen
May 18, 2009
Last time I described the design and major functions of Bucardo version 1 in detail. A natural question to ask about Bucardo 1 is, why didn’t I use something else already out there? And that’s a very good question.
I had no desire to create a new replication system and work out the inevitable kinks that would come with that. However, nothing then available met our needs, and today still nothing I’m familiar with quite would. So writing something new was necessary. Writing an asynchronous multimaster replications system for Postgres was not trivial, but turned out to be easier than I had expected thanks to Postgres itself—with the caveats noted in the last post.
But, back to the landscape. What follows is a survey of the Postgres replication landscape as it looked in mid-2002 when I first needed multimaster replication for PostgreSQL 7.2.
pgreplicator
PostgreSQL Replicator is probably the most similar project to Bucardo 1. It was released in 2001 and does not appear to have had any updates since October 2001. I don’t recall why I didn’t use this, but from reviewing the documentation I suspect it was because it hadn’t been updated for PostgreSQL 7.2, it used PL/Tcl, and required a …
database postgres bucardo
The design of Bucardo version 1
By Jon Jensen
May 15, 2009
Since PGCon 2009 begins next week, I thought it would be a good time to start publishing some history of the Bucardo replication system for PostgreSQL. Here I will cover only Bucardo version 1 and leave Bucardo versions 2 and 3 for a later post.
Bucardo 1 is an asynchronous multi-master and master/slave database replication system. I designed it in August-September 2002, to run in Perl 5.6 using PostgreSQL 7.2. It was later updated to support PostgreSQL 7.4 and 8.1, and changes in DBD::Pg’s COPY functionality. It was built for and funded by Backcountry.com, and various versions of Bucardo have been used in production as a core piece of their infrastructure from September 2002 to the present.
Bucardo’s design is simple, relying on the consistently correct behavior of the underlying PostgreSQL database software. It made some compromises on ideal behavior in order to have a working system in a reasonable amount of time, but the compromises are few and are mentioned below.
General design
Bucardo 1 needed to:
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Support asynchronous multimaster replication.
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Support asynchronous master/slave replication of full tables and changes to tables.
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Leave frequency of replication up to the …
database postgres bucardo
RailsConf 2009 report
By Sean Schofield
May 14, 2009
RailsConf 2009 concluded last week so its time for me to talk about some of the highlights for my fellow teammates that could not make it. I think one of the more interesting talks was given by Yehuda Katz. The talk was on the “Russian Doll Pattern” and dealt with mountable apps in the upcoming Rails 3.0 release (slides available here.) Even though he felt like it wasn’t his best talk I thought it was quite interesting. Personally, I thought it was refreshing to see something that was not yet complete. The Rails core team should do more of this kind of thing as it provides the community a chance to give feedback on features before they’re set in stone.
The Rails Envy guys were there and gave a very interesting presentation about innovations in Rails this past year. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Spree made this list and they even included the new interface in their screenshots. Gregg made some excellent videos from the conference as well which capture some of the spirit of the conference.
This year I had a chance to meet Fabio Akita in person. Fabio has a great blog called Akita on Rails which has a huge following in Brazil. He also does a lot of interesting in-depth …
conference rails spree
Operating system upgrades
By Jon Jensen
May 12, 2009
This won’t be earth-shattering news to anyone, I hope, but I’m pleased to report that two recent operating system upgrades went very well.
I upgraded a laptop from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, and it’s the smoothest I’ve ever had the process go. The only problem of any kind was that the package download process stalled on the last of 1700+ files downloaded, and I had to restart the upgrade, but all the cached files were still there and on reboot everything worked including my two-monitor setup, goofy laptop audio chipset, wireless networking, crypto filesystem, and everything else.
I also upgraded an OpenBSD 4.3 server that is a firewall, NAT router, DHCP server, and DNS server, to OpenBSD 4.5. It was the first time I used the in-place upgrade with no special boot media and fetching packages over the network, as per the bsd.rd instructions, and it went fine. Then the extra packages that were there before had to be upgraded separately as per the FAQ on pkg updates. I initially scripted some munging of pkg_info’s output, not realizing I could simply run pkg_add -u and it updates all packages.
There was one hangup upgrading zsh, which I just removed and reinstalled. Everything else went fine, …
environment open-source
Spree at RailsConf
By Steph Skardal
May 11, 2009
Last week at RailsConf 2009, the Spree folks from End Point conducted a Birds of a Feather session to discuss Spree, an End Point sponsored open source rails ecommerce platform. Below is some of the dialog from the discussion (paraphrased).
Crowd: “How difficult is it to get Spree up and running from start to finish?”
Spree Crew: “This depends on the level of customization. If a customer simple needs to reskin the site, this shouldn’t take more than a week (hopefully much less than a full week). If the customer needs specific functionality that is not included in core functionality or extensions, you may need to spend some time developing an extension.”
Crowd: “How difficult is it to develop extensions in Spree?”
Spree Crew: “Spree extension work is based on the work of the Radiant community. Extensions are mini-applications: they allow you to drop a pre-built application into spree to override or insert new functionality. Documentation for extensions is available at the spree github wiki. We also plan to release more extensive Spree Guides documentation based on Rails Guides soon.”
Spree Crew: “How did you hear about Spree?”
Crowd: “My client and I found it via search engines. My …
conference rails spree cms magento
TLS Server Name Indication
By Jon Jensen
May 8, 2009
I came across a few discussions of the TLS extension “Server Name Indication”, which would allow hosting more than one “secure” (https) website per IP address/TCP port combination. The best summary of the state of things is (surprise, surprise) the Wikipedia Server Name Indication article. There are more details about client and server software support for SNI in Zachary Schneider’s blog post and Daniel Lange’s blog post.
I don’t recall hearing about this before, but if I did I probably dismissed as being irrelevant at the time because there would’ve been almost no support in either clients or servers. But now that all major browsers on all operating systems support SNI except some on Windows XP it may be worth keeping an eye on this.
Yes, IE on Windows XP is still a huge contingent and thus a huge hurdle. But maybe Microsoft will backport SNI support to XP. Even if just for IE 7 and later. Or maybe we’ll have to wait a few more years till the next Windows operating system (hopefully) displaces XP. Here’s a case where the low popularity of Vista (which supports SNI) is hurting the rest of us.
I’m really looking forward to the flexibility of name-based virtual hosting for https that …
environment