David Fetter's blog

MVC Backups

nospam@example.com (David Fetter) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 19:18:11 +0300

Since Josh Drake has failed to allow comments on his very excellent blog, especially this post,I have to respond below.
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Tablespaces in a (nut)shell

nospam@example.com (David Fetter) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 20:16:37 +0300

Sometimes, you run across traces of LarryDB. One typical one is a profusion of tablespaces.

Until you solve that problem, you'll need to deal with them. Let's take setting up a warm standby.

Continue reading "Tablespaces in a (nut)shell"

Part(ition)ing Glances

nospam@example.com (David Fetter) — Wed, 05 May 2010 02:24:24 +0300

In an earlier installment, we learned about how to partition a
referenced table, which was good as far as it went. A commenter very
astutely pointed out that this didn't work with RETURNING, so I set
to work fixing that problem.

Here's what I came up with.

Continue reading "Part(ition)ing Glances"

psql, Paste, Perl: Pefficiency!

nospam@example.com (David Fetter) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 07:38:45 +0300

Enough alliteration already!

I was looking at Regina Obe's excellent piece on how to use psql to do an import on fixed-width data, and thought to myself, "self, how would you do this with fewer copies, just in case you happened across a few hundred gigs of data?"

Here's what I came up with:

Continue reading "psql, Paste, Perl: Pefficiency!"

File-driven Include and Exclude for pg_dump

nospam@example.com (David Fetter) — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 02:06:34 +0300

So you're about to start replicating part of a database using Slony, and you'd rather not set up your replicas with all the extra cruft. You've made your list, but what to do with it?

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The Cloud Under the Lamp Post

nospam@example.com (David Fetter) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:12:57 +0300

A drunk is under a lamp post. It's late at night, and he is crawling
around on his hands and knees, searching frantically all over the tiny
pool of brilliant light it casts. A passer-by asks him, "what are you
doing?" He answers, "I'm looking for my keys." Pointing out into the
darkness, he continues, "I dropped them over there, but the light's
much better over here."

The joke is an old one, and illustrates an interesting truth about
human psychology.

What does this have to do with The Cloud, you ask?

Read on.

Continue reading "The Cloud Under the Lamp Post"

Partly Cloudy, with a Very High Chance of FAIL

nospam@example.com (David Fetter) — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:48:19 +0300

Everywhere you turn, it's "cloud" this, "cloud" that, "cloud" the other.
Public clouds, private clouds, hybrid
clouds, fluffy clouds...but somewhere in all that billowing haze,
there's an actual use case.

The people who designed cloud computing made certain explicit
trade-offs, some of which have been lost in all the hype. Given those
explicit trade-offs, your application is a candidate for "the cloud" in
general only if it has all of the following characteristics:

- Embarrassingly parallelizable
- Does not have bounded latency requirements
- Needs CPU much more than I/O
- Tolerant to partial data loss

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Free Your DBI-Link, and the Rest Will Follow

nospam@example.com (David Fetter) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:46:57 +0200

DBI-Link is now on Github!

Here's how I did it:
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Git + bash = win

nospam@example.com (David Fetter) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:38:26 +0200

Modern git comes with a great way to improve your life: git-completion.bash. To use it, just add the following to your .bashrc:

if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then

    . /etc/bash_completion

    export PS1='\h:\u:\w $(__git_ps1 "(%s) ")'

fi

Once you've done this, any time you're in a git subdirectory, the branch name will appear in your PS1.
Any time you're not, it won't.
Simple!

Scripting psql for Fun and Profit

nospam@example.com (David Fetter) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:09:22 +0200

Profit?

Yes!
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Part(ition)ing Is Such Sweet Sorrow

nospam@example.com (David Fetter) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:21:41 +0200

There are excellent references on partitioning tables that depend on one table, but what happens when you need to partition the referenced table?

Let's find out!
Continue reading "Part(ition)ing Is Such Sweet Sorrow"