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PGCon thus far

By Josh Tolley
May 21, 2009

Though it might flood the End Point blog with PGCon content, I’m compelled to scribble something of my own to report on the last couple of days. Wednesday’s Developers’ Meeting was an interesting experience and I felt privileged to be invited. Although I could only stay for the first half, as my own presentation was scheduled for the afternoon, I enjoyed the opportunity to meet many PostgreSQL “luminaries”, and participate in some of the decisions behind the project.

Attendance at my “How to write a PostgreSQL Procedural Language” tutorial exceeded my expectations, no doubt in part, at least, because aside from the Developers’ Meeting it was the only thing going on. Many people seem interested in being able to write code for the PostgreSQL backend, and the lessons learned from PL/LOLCODE have broad application. It was suggested, even, that since PL/pgSQL converts most of its statements to SQL and passes the result to the SQL parser, PL/LOLCODE would have less parsing overhead than PL/pgSQL. Ensuing discussions of high performance LOLCODE were cancelled due to involuntary giggling.

Between talks I’ve had the opportunity to meet a wide variety of PostgreSQL users and contributors, …

PgCon: the developer’s meeting and the 2009 keynote

By Selena Deckelmann
May 21, 2009

Yesterday, I spent the entire day at a Postgres Developers meeting, discussing what happened over the last year, and how we’re going to tackle a series of critical problems in the next year. We talked about how to get the Synchronous Replication and Hot Standby patches completed, important adoption issues, our continued participation in the SQL Standards committee (a surprising number of people were interested!), moving forward with alpha releases after commitfests (woo!), and creating a better infrastucture for managing modules and addons to Postgres.

That evening, a few of us were treated by Paul Vallee of Pythian Group to dinner and a trip to another of Ottawa’s great local pubs. We discussed the future of open source databases and the relative quality of beer in Ottawa, Portland and the UK. Of course, I think Portland has the best beer ;)

This morning, Dan introduced everyone to the start of the sessions, and then Dave, Magnus and I managed to get through the keynote. It was mostly an opportunity to announce 8.4 Beta2, plug a few of the talks and mention all the different individuals involved in development. And have a laugh about our conference tshirts.

I have an hour and a …

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.

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.

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 …

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:

• Support asynchronous multimaster replication.

• Support asynchronous master/slave replication of full tables and changes to tables.

• Leave frequency of replication up to the …

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 …

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, …