There is just one day left and we’ll start the Brighton PostgreSQL Meetup. I invested some resources in this project like and I truly believe it can be a success.
I still can’t believe that in just one month 25 people already have shown  the interest on being part of the Brighton PostgreSQL Group. And today another nice suprise. I received the new shiny mascot for our group.

He’s Marvin, the sea elephant. The author if this fantastic drawing is Elena, an incredibly talentuous artist from Italy. 

After upgrading some clusters to PostgreSQL 9.4.4 I noticed an increase of the database backup. Because the databases are quite large I’m taking the advantage of the parallel export introduced with PostgreSQL 9.3.

The parallel dump uses the PostgreSQL’s snapshot export with multiple backends. The functionality requires the dump to be in directory format where a toc file is saved alongside with the compressed exports, one per each table saved by pg_dump.

Named identifiers

Writing and debugging the SQL is not simple and a little bit of clarity becomes a massive help. Adding a prefix to the identifiers gives to the SQL developer a great knowledge about the database schema.

This naming convention makes clear the difference between tables which are physical entities, and the views which are names for saved SQL statement.

Adopting a similar approach for the column names makes the data type immediately recognisable.

After a while I finally started a PostgreSQL Meetup in Brighton.
I reckon there are several people interested in PostgreSQL in the UK and I’ve met many of them in the Sussex area.

I’m quite new to the Meetup platform so I still need to learn how to use it correctly. However, anybody is absolutely welcome to help to organise a PostgreSQL community in the area.

The link is here. http://www.meetup.com/Brighton-PostgreSQL-Meetup/
I’ve already scheduled a PostgreSQL beer, an informal chit chat about our database of choice and the future of the community.

INSERT

The INSERT statement is composed by two elements, the attribute list and the values list. The lists are positional. The formatting should mark clearly the various elements of the query in order to make it simpler to spot the correspondence between the attribute and the value.

• After the words INSERT INTO there is one space followed by the table’s name
• After the table’s name there is one carriage return
• The attributes if present are enclosed between round brackets indented one tab from the word INSERT
• The attribute’s list indents one tab from the round brackets
• The attributes indent one tab fro the round brackets and are separated by a carriage return
• The word VALUES indents at the same level of INSERT and is followed by a carriage return
• The value’s list is surrounded by round brackets indented one tab from the word VALUE
• The values indent one tab fro the round brackets and are separated by a carriage return