Dave's PostgreSQL Blog

As you may have read in the press, at pgCon 2008 Yahoo described the architecture of their 2 PetaByte Everest database, built on PostgreSQL. What's really cool for me is that they manage it using pgAdmin (in addition to some of their own tools) - as evidenced in the top right hand block in this architectural diagram, photographed by Gavin during the Yahoo lightning talk.

Nice one

Yesterday saw the first UK PostgreSQL conference held at the Conservatoire in Birmingham. Primarily a user event the conference attracted people from all over the UK as well as Ireland and led to talks in front of a packed room throughout the day.

So whilst I was travelling to New Jersey earlier today with Heikki (you know, PostgreSQL 2PC author, the newest of our committers), the guys in the EnterpriseDB head office switched on our updated website and unveiled the Postgres Plus and Postgres Plus Advanced Server stuff that I've been working on for a while now.

So finally after years of on-off discussions at the pub, Simon Riggs and I have finally got the first ever UK PostgreSQL Conference organised! It will be on April the 2nd, in central Birmingham. The theme is 'PostgreSQL in the UK'.

So, to avoid disappointment, visit the conference website and book your place today!

pgAdmin has had the ability to create and manage Slony-I replication clusters for some time, however it is designed to allow the user to work directly with the lower-level Slony concepts such as listens and paths. This is pretty flexible, but isn't particularly user-friendly. We are hoping to include some wizards in the future to make it much easier to setup and modify clusters, but in the meantime here's a long overdue walkthrough using the existing features to create a 3 node replication cluster.

In this example, a master server is setup with two direct slaves. This example was written and tested using Slony-I v1.2.11 and PostgreSQL 8.2.5, running on a single Windows XP machine. The PostgreSQL pgbench utility is used to generate the test schema and workload.

OK, to get the usual intro over and done with - blog, neglected, back now, very sorry, won't do it again.

And now onto business... Ben West reported a problem with pgAdmin III v.1.8.0 Beta 2 on Windows which seems to have gained a dependency on MSVCR71.DLL (that's the Visual C++ runtime library for VC++ 7.1). pgAdmin is built with VC++ 8 these days so we really don't want to ship the 7.1 runtimes. After a little investigation, it seems that the latest builds of OpenSSL from Shining Light Productions are built using VC++ 7.1

So, it seems we need to build OpenSSL ourselves now to avoid this issue. I struggled to find the details of how to do that, so after finding the relevant info elsewhere, I'll repeat it here for future reference...

So Parallels have now released an RC of the new version of their Desktop for Mac virtualisation product which can share an XP installation with Bootcamp. Unfortunately this setup doesn't seem to play well with UK MacBook Pro keyboards (for example, there's no way in Bootcamp to type a #!!), so after trying a few other solutions on the net the seemed equally broken, I just gave up and wrote my own keyboard map for Windows.

Enjoy!

Once again I've been neglecting my blog - this time it's been months and months since my last entry which looking back I see was a drunken rambling following a conversation with (and about) Jim Nasby in the company of Magnus and an assortment of people from EnterpriseDB. Which is quite a coincidence really as the point of this blog entry is to announce to anyone that's interested that after more than 11 years at Vale Housing, I'll be joining EnterpriseDB in January.

It seems I have been remise in writing up my experiences in Toronto as a number of the other hackers have been doing during the PostgreSQL 10th Anniversary Summit. So, to that end and in my current slightly drunken state I offer you this thought for the night that arose fromm a conversation with Jim Nasby, Denis Lussier, Simon Riggs, Magnus Hagander and Greg Stark:

What's the use-case for a Jim Nasby?

And though I'll probably think "what the hell did I write that for?" in the morning, I'll just hit 'Publish' and tootle off to bed...

Well, given the complete lack of activity on planetpostgresql/dpage you'd be forgiven for assuming I was dead or had been kidnapped by the Lizard Alliance to be used as a crash test dummy, but no, I've just been lazy and haven't written anything recently.

So, to put that to rights, here's a pgAdmin update. For the last few days I've been working on cosmetic and usability issues in the user interface, and consequently, 1.6.0 (when released) will sport a fancy new docking user interface on the main windows, allowing you to arrange elements as you like, detach panes, move toolbars around and display or hide individual elements. There are also popup docking hints to make it easy to re-dock elements exactly where you want them...

Some random noise for the old blog...

First off, an article by Jason Gilmore discusses 5 outdated reasons why people don't choose PostgreSQL. pgAdmin gets a mention under the No professional development and administration tools section. The article was picked up and discussed in depth on Slashdot

Second, (in a shameless plug) a small site I've been developing in spare five minute sessions for my wife Jo went live the other day. www.jo-jos-jewellery.co.uk is powered by PostgreSQL 8.1 (of course), running with Apache and PHP on FreeBSD. The more interesting part of the work was interfacing the site with Paypal who provide some great resources for developers, including an extremely useful sandbox version of their site for developers to test and experiment with.

'Nothing spectacular' I hear some of you cry - well, perhaps not. Certainly technically there's nothing particularly difficult in the site code, but coming from a decidedly non-commercial work environment as I do it made a very refreshing and welcome change to do something completely different. Now if only I could get my head round Google Adwords...

The pgAdmin Development Team are pleased to announce the release of version 1.4.2 of pgAdmin, the Open Source administration and development platform for PostgreSQL 7.3 and above. pgAdmin can be run on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OSX, Solaris and Windows. For more information, please see the website at:

http://www.pgadmin.org/

pgAdmin can be downloaded free of charge from:

http://www.pgadmin.org/download/

The pgAdmin query tool (see the bottom two screenshots here) has caused people to mistakenly think their PostgreSQL queries have been overly slow a number of times in the past. In actual fact, PostgreSQL is normally running just fine, as is the query. Some users have then pointed their finger at the network, questioning whether SSL might be to blame, or the TCP/IP stack or firewall on their client machine. Well, sometimes the network is the cause, but in a number of cases what the user is actually seeing is the machine's native listview control taking it's time leisurely rendering the results.

Well, I figured it was about time to update the old blog with a new entry for 2006 (Happy New Year btw). A short entry this time - I've just finished a major update of the pgAdmin website.

Nothing spectacular, just:

• an update of the colour scheme to match the current version of pgAdmin
• a re-write of the framework code and CSS
• a whole heap of reorganising of content in order to split some of the excessively long pages down into multiple smaller ones.
• the addition of the 1.4 and development documentation, updated hourly from SVN

Currently it's all in English, but in a week or so once all the typos have been spotted I'll pass it on to the translators.

Anyhoo, check it out at http://www.pgadmin.org. Enjoy.

So, as part of our work porting Slony-I to Windows, and adding full support to pgAdmin, Andreas, Magnus and I were invited to present our work at a seminar in Tokyo, organised by Hiroshi Saito and his employer, SKC. We met in the departure lounge at London Heathrow from where we flew to Narita, Tokyo on Wednesday last week. Hiroshi met us at the airport, and brought us back to our hotel in Shimbashi.

The first evening we attended a welcome party with various members of the Japan PostgreSQL Users Group or JPUG for short. After a good meal and plenty of food it was off to bed to recover from the 30 hour first day!

On Friday we travelled by train to the seminar, and after an Italian lunch(!!) proceeded to give our talks to around 70 JPUG members. I spoke first on replication in general, and then on the Slony porting project and how we worked. An hour later, Magnus took to the stage and discussed the details of porting slon in more depth, and then gave a perfectly executed demonstration of Slony-I running on Windows. Finally, Andreas discussed the new management features added to pgAdmin.

[From left to right, Andreas Pflug, Magnus Hagander, myself and Hiroshi Saito]

After the presentation, we headed down to the restaurant in the building for and evening reception with beer, buffet and even a little bingo. Lot's of business cards were exchanged with a variety of PostgreSQL users and developers, and even one of the Firebird team!!

On Saturday, we spent a day sight-seeing, mainly in Kamakura where we visted a couple of temples and a very large cast iron Buddha. Lunch was Korean barbeque, following which we took a trip back to Tokyo station on the Shinkansen, or Bullet Train. A few beers in the 'Victorian Pub' across the courtyard from the hotel entrance, and it was off to bed before the journey back to the UK, Sweden and Germany in the morning.

All told, an excellent trip on which we were welcomed by our extremely hospitable Japanese friends. Many thanks in particular to Hiroshi Saito and SKC, not to mention the rest of the JPUG members.