Monthly Archives: June 2019

June 27, 2019 · 1:56 pm

Bitemporal documentation is available!

Everybody who was curious enough to start using our pg_bitemporal github repo would complain about the lack of documentation, so we’ve tried really hard to provide our follows with some guidance.

What we have now, is very far from perfect, but if you go to the docs directory, there is a lot of documentation, including our old presentations, explanations of the basic bitemporal concepts and most importantly first ever bitemporal functions manual, which we promise to make more readable in the nearest future. Meanwhile – please share your feedback! Thank you!

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June 22, 2019 · 10:11 pm

PG Open 2019

Hi everybody! If for any reason you’ve missed the announcement, here is one more reminder: the PG Open  2019 conference has been announced;  it will be held in Orlando FL  on September 11-13.

Please check out the conference website for details. Now it’s time to submit your talk proposal! A good part of the Postgres community conferences is, that you do not need to submit the actual talk – you just need a couple of paragraphs, which state, what you are going to talk about. I would like to encourage everybody who’s done something interesting with Postgres to consider a talk submission.  I want to stress it one more time: it is not difficult.  You do not have to be a mamber of the Postgres Core Team to submit a talk! And remember, if your talk will be selected, you will participate in the conference for free!

See you in Orlando?…

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June 18, 2019 · 9:53 am

My Team Anniversary

Exactly one year ago, my team became three times bigger. So today is not only the first anniversary for my co-workers Sudheer and Tejas but also the first anniversary of the Braviant database team.

Thank you guys for doing an outstanding job!

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June 17, 2019 · 8:33 am

Databases are not sexy?

I’ve heard this line from a former colleague of mine. He was explaining why there are so little database people around, why IT students are not specializing in databases. That was his answer – that it not cool. “WEB-designer” sounds cool, “database developer” does not.

Several months passed since I heard that, and I was thinking: I should write a blog post about it! However, honestly – what else I can say except the things I’ve already said in this blog multiple times? That there is nothing more exciting, than exploring the endless possibilities of SQL, that nothing can be more rewarding than applying your magic to the jobs, which runs for an hour, and all of a sudden it runs in less than a minute and produces the same result:)

I suspect that the general public does not think that there is something behind a web page, and when somebody experiences a website slowness, they refer to it as “the internet is slow.” Also, the buzz words like “Big Data” often send a message, that “the databases are outdated,” and that there is something bigger, and cooler, and more fashionable, than just”databases,” which does not help a bit.

As I always like to be practical, and not only state a problem but come up with a way to solve it, I am now thinking about how to bridge this gap. I want to find ways to reach out to college and high school students and to give them some exposure to the Wonderful World Of Data. A couple of years ago when I was attending one of the Big Conferences, I’ve heard a discussion regarding “what our students want to be taught.” That was a time of Big Data just becoming a Big Deal :). Honestly, my opinion is that the student’s interest should not drive a curriculum entirely 🙂 and that that’s the right place to interfere.

Is anybody interested in joining me in this effort?

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June 5, 2019 · 10:32 pm

Working Under Pressure, Next Chicago PUG And The Wonders of FDW

Anybody likes working under pressure? Anybody likes production crisis? Nobody would admit it, however…

Try to recall something really exciting which has happened to you in your work environment. No, not your recent promotion :). Try to remember last time you did something great, and things worked fabulously. May be you were not running around, as I do in such cases, telling everybody what a cool thing I just came up with, but even without this running around, most likely your the last great thing happened when there was some serious production issue and you had very limited time to come up with an entirely new solution.

You know how I love sharing the story of New York Hight School Application Processing System! And when I tell this story, I always mention, that I had very limited time to fix everything, and worked 16-hours days for 2 weeks.

It was not that kind of crisis recently at my work, but it was still a production issue . And as 99% of all of our production issues, this one have happened during some interaction with our third party service provider, who’s utilizing MySQL. To be honest, knowing what I know now about MySQL as of now, I am very close to making a statement, that it in not a database! Because, anything which wants to be treated as a database, should know how to use indexes :).

To make the story short, we’ve figured it all out, and rewrote a query – in a most absurd way :), I have to admit. But after this one, and a whole bunch of other similar exercises, I think I have a very good understanding of how things work on the MySQL, what is getting lost when we are using FDW, and what and how can be mitigated.

And guess what – I will be taking about all this cool stuff next Wednesday, at the Chicago PUG. Come and join the conversation!

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