planetpg

One of the things that distinguish PostgreSQL from other database systems is the way the dependencies between database objects are managed.

PostgreSQL do not allow any invalid object like views or functions. Therefore any action that can invalidate dependent objects results in an error or it’s propagated to the dependent objects.

The mechanism could be confusing at first sight. However the implementation is brilliant and gives great flexibility.

When in February I received the email with the news that my talk was accepted at the pgcon it took me some time, and several espresso coffee, to realise that I wasn’t dreaming. The pgcon email reached me few days after the same talk was accepted at the pycon nove, the Italy’s nationwide Python conference. The Italian Pycon and the Pgcon are great conferences with amazing speakers and fantastic topics. The sole idea of giving my small contribution it makes me proud and a little scared, because I never talked to an audience composed mostly by fine developers.

Before the release of pg_chameleon 2.0 I had to write an upgrade procedure to allow a smooth migration from the version 1.8.

An interesting challenge I faced was to determine the maximum and minimum position for the MySQL’s binary logs belonging to the same server but stored with different values in multiple sources.

The user defined aggregates, a feature pretty unique to PostgreSQL, allowed me to solve the problem in a robust and simple way.

Back in the days of when I was an Oracle DBA I had to solve a strange behaviour on an Oracle installation. The system for some reasons stopped accepting the writes occasionally and without an apparent reason. This behaviour appeared odd to anybody except for my team, which addressed the issue immediately. The problem was caused by a not optimal configuration on the Oracle instance. This thought led me to writing this post.

An ancient italian proverb says Il backup è quella cosa che andava fatta prima. A rough translation could be something like this: the backup is the thing that had to be done before. The concept of backup is quite confusing. Some people wrongly believe that executing a local backup is sufficient to ensure the recover of the data. In the real world a valid backup is present only if three conditions are true.