Devrim's PostgreSQL Diary

In case you missed this, here is a very good presentation about HOT. Oscar goes to Pavan Deolasse. (I prepared a Turkish presentation regarding MVCC,Vacuum,Bgwriter and HOT, and you can also find it here, if you know Turkish )

...and yes, I'm enjoying a perfect holiday -- I have always made good decisions while swimming.

It has been almost 2 years since I spent time for a vacation -- After I got married about 2 years ago,we had a 1-week honeymoon -- Then, last year, my son was born, and we found no time for a holiday.

Everyone near me, except me ( ) said that I'm tired -- so I was forced for a 2-week holiday. It is hard to be away from my laptop, but still See you two weeks later.

Sorry for the delay, folks -- I promise that it won't happen again. A few days ago, I added Fedora-9 supporto to PostgreSQL RPM Repository. 8.3 support is complete. I added 7.4, 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2 packages, too, but did not add other PostgreSQL related packages to those branches, yet.

It has been almost 4 years since I started Planet PostgreSQL project. It actually started at August 2004, but for some reasons, it went live sometime around December.

Since then, Planet PostgreSQL is/was more or less my project. Magnus and Robert helped me a lot in many ways -- these three people still decide on Planet PostgreSQL management.

About 2 years ago, www.postgresql.org began pulling headlines from Planet, and as of last year, Planet PostgreSQL was placed in front page. This was one of the great successes of Planet.

Planet PostgreSQL is actually an aggregator. OTOH, it encouraged PostgreSQL people in the community blog more and more. IIRC, noone among developers were blogging when I first started Planet PostgreSQL -- but now, we have people even from Core Team! We have very valuable blog posts.

Now, why I wrote all of this:

Even though I'm working for Command Prompt, CMD and /or Joshua does not directly control Planet . If you have problems with Planet and its administrators (mostly me) , calling/e-mailing Joshua will not help you. Actually, it will end up with a negative effect on me. Joshua is my boss, friend -- but does not control my management over Planet (of course, I also take ideas from him from time to time, and I find them very valuable). ...and yes, Planet PostgreSQL is running on a server that CMD hosts. But still, this project is not related to my work at Command Prompt.

So, please stop pestering Joshua/Andrew/others for Planet -- feel free to pester me, Magnus and Robert.

I released v2 of PostgreSQL Live CD, which is based on Fedora and PostgreSQL RPM Repository packages.

Changes in the new version

- Update to PostgreSQL 8.3.1
- New packages: pg_filedump, ruby-pg and pgbouncer
- Updated packages: plruby, ptop
- Option to install to USB stick

The first version has been downloaded 392 times as of now.

Atsushi committed PGCluster versions to PGCluster SVN Repository. Thanks!

It's been about 2 months since I announced PostgreSQL RPM Repository, and I have some data about our repository users who deployed it on their systems.

Continue reading "Trends for Fedora/Red Hat/Centos + PostgreSQL users "

I released initial iso image of the live CD project that I'm working on, based on Fedora and PGDG RPM Repository packages, including: PostgreSQL core, replication tools, connection poolers, sample databases, administration tools, log analyzer, GIS extension, Python interface, sh and ruby PLs, and other utilities like ip4r, orafce and table_log.

After booting, you can use this image to install a PostgreSQL server based on Fedora. Just click the icon on the desktop. For details, please read live cd page.

The first commit festival for 8.4 begins 1st of March -- We will see which patches will be in the core this round. The next festival will be 2 months later.

I spent a few hours yesterday evening to create a new live CD image based on Fedora 8 and PGDG 8.3 RPMs.

Details are here. You can also use this CD to install to hard drive, after booting and logging in. It is as easy as clicking an icon on the desktop.

Have fun.

I want to announce that PostgreSQL RPM Yum repository and RPM Buildfarm are now available.

With this repository, you will be able to install your favorite PostgreSQL version with the other compatible PostgreSQL related software to your favorite OS . You don't have to stick to OS-supplied RPM packages.

Please visit http://yum.pgsqlrpms.org for details.

Also, PostgreSQL RPM Buildfarm is out. It is a set of Xen instances which includes all combinations of RHEL / CentOS 3,4,5 and Fedora 7,8 with 32 and 64 bit architectures, as well as all PostgreSQL major releases. More will come later. RPM users will be able to find all the combinations from now on, even if it is not supported by the OS itself. For example, if you want to run PostgreSQL 8.2 on RHEL 5, and also want to run Slony-I compiled
on this platform against this PostgreSQL release, want to analyze your logs with pgfouine, and run ptop , PGDG RPM Building Project will provide you all the binaries. Also, in near future, we will be able to have daily packages, based on the CVS versions of each major release.

Special thanks go to Darcy Buskermolen, my colleague at Command Prompt, for providing hardware, building Xen infastructure and spending countless, countless and countless hours on it. Thanks Darcy. (Thanks again).

I have been thinking of an automated RPM build server for PGDG RPMs + the RPMs that I build for the community for a long time. Since not all of the packages were approved by Fedora, we need a private platform for us... Also there is another strong reason for that: We provide RPMs for every PostgreSQL release x every distro we support x every arch we support. This ends up 60 OS/PostgreSQL/Architecture combination (noarch can be built on any of them, so no need for more)-- and yes, we also need a yum repository for our packages.

So what is the solution? The solution is simple in fact: Koji + Xen + some scripting. Koji is the open source software that Fedora uses to build their packages. Fedora packages just submit the srpm to koji, sit back and relax: Koji builds the packages with all supported archs, provides detailed build report, and also the rpms. Then kojira turns them into the yum repository, which is the final step. That's all.

I almost made this one working, and we will work with Darcy on the Xen scripting side so that when a packager submits an SRPM, the vm will be turned on so that it won't use system resources when idle. Needless to say, Koji uses PostgreSQL at the backend.

We can even build daily SRPMs for the CVS snapshots of each branch so that people can test the latest patches in their server without compiling -- a simple yum command will be fine!

Stay tuned.

New Survey Up: What 8.3 core feature are you most excited about?
http://www.postgresql.org/community/
8.3 beta 2 is coming soon because you tested 8.3 beta 1. Keep testing!

Continue reading "PostgreSQL Weekly News - October 16 2007"

PostgreSQL 8.3 beta 1 was announced today.
Note: This weekly news is for PostgreSQL.

Continue reading "PostgreSQL Weekly News - Oct 8th, 2007"

Marc tagged 8.3beta1 a few minutes before, and we are about to enter beta... Now, time to test this great release.