The ansible is a fictional device invented by Ursula K. Le Guin. The ansible allows fast communication between two points across the space, regardless of the distance.

It doesn’t surprise that the Red Hat’s ansible shares the same name as it gives a simple and efficient way to manage servers and automate tasks, yet remaining very lightweight with minimal requirements on the target machines.

In the previous post we introduced the PostgreSQL’s dependency system.

At first sight the implementation can look like a maze where the succession of relationships are not clear.

This post will try to give a practical example to show how pg_depend can act like an Ariadne’s thread in order to resolve the dependencies.

The scenario presented is very simple but can be used as a starting point for more complex requirements.

The 20th of April I was supposed to give the pgchameleon’s talk at the Pycon 9. However personal issues prevented me to come to Florence. This post is an explanation and an apology for the pycon 9 attendees and organisers.

Database administrators usually work behind the scenes, over the weekends and in antisocial hours. They strive to look after the database which is at the core of any business with little or no recognition.

The sad truth is that the DBA is one of the most obscure and one of the less appreciated roles within the IT organisations.

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.

Few years ago I went trough a massive frustration. My team aligned with the rest of the company in using the Agile methodology. Initially the team decided to use Scrum then it switched to a sort of kanban. However even both approaches failed miserably dropping the team in utter chaos. I remember the daily standups. It was like playing a stage role, people stated the tasks for the day knowing that that task would be not the one the will work on it.

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.