Bringing together some of the world's top PostgreSQL experts.
The profiling utility perf that ships with the Linux kernel is extremely useful for examining system-wide and multi-process behaviour – but it does a lot more than the CPU profiling it’s often used for. You’ve probably looked at perf top -az or perf top -u postgres output, but that’s only the littlest bit of what […]
People are often hesitant to test out a new PostgreSQL release because they’re concerned it’ll break their current working installation. This is a perfectly valid concern, but it’s easily resolved with a few simple protective measures: Build PostgreSQL from source as an unprivileged user Install your PostgreSQL build within that user’s home directory Run PostgreSQL […]
(This article is written with reference to PostgreSQL 9.3. If you’re using a newer version please check to make sure any limitations described remain in place.) PostgreSQL offers several tools for searching and pattern matching text. The challenge is choosing which to use for a job. There’s: LIKE and ILIKE SQL pattern matching; ~ and […]
As interest in PostgreSQL grows, so does the rate at which new patches are proposed. To maintain the high level of quality in PostgreSQL it is important that all patches be checked and reviewed, so that what gets added to the codebase is good quality. Some of this evaluation requires a lot of expertise in […]
Cygwin users, If you use PostgreSQL on Cygwin, please try out this build fix, verifying that it works on Cygwin, and that it doesn’t break the Linux/BSD builds or the MinGW Windows builds. Your help would be appreciated in ensuring that Cygwin remains a supported platform into the future.
SELinux / SEPostgreSQL users: There are some proposed improvements in the 2013-01 commitfest that might go into PostgreSQL 9.3 – but only if you help. Interested users are needed to try out the following patches and report back with their experiences if you want to see these changes in 9.3: The patches are: Add a […]
I just confirmed the cause an extremely weird problem that’s been frustrating me for days. I want to share it so nobody else has to waste their time on this. It appears that – at least on my build machine, a Windows 7 SP1 x64 box with Windows SDK 7.1, Visual Studio 2010 Express SP1 […]
As part of some internal continuous integration and testing work, I’ve put together some scripts to simplify the compilation of PostgreSQL on Windows. PostgreSQL its self is pretty easy to compile on Windows. You download and install ActiveState Perl and Visual Studio or the Microsoft Windows SDK, unpack a PostgreSQL source tree, copy config_default.pl to […]
Today I ran into another strange issue with PostgreSQL installation on Windows. It turned out not to be a problem with the installer; instead it was a form of broken Windows installation that I hadn’t seen before, so I thought I’d write it up. The installer already contains checks for several kinds of broken Windows […]
Questions periodically come up on the PostgreSQL mailing list regarding Amazon EC2 and how to get PostgreSQL to perform well on it. The general feeling on the list appears to have been that EC2 performs very poorly for database workloads, at least with PostgreSQL, and it doesn’t seem to be taken particularly seriously as a […]
