Bruce Momjian: Postgres Blog

User Testimonial Video at PG East

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:15:01 -0500

EnterpriseDB believes in the marketing potential of videos. You might remember them producing a video of me explaining pg_migrator last year.

This year, they will be interviewing PG East attendees to create a Postgres user testimonial video. The community has not used videos extensively for marketing, partly because, while it is easy to create a video, it is difficult to create a good video. (Consider the quality of the average YouTube video.) Anyway, my guess is that the video will be something like this customer video. The video will be shared with the community to help promote Postgres worldwide.

9.0 Status Report

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 12:00:00 -0500

Many people are waiting for Postgres 9.0, so here is a status report about the release. Two weeks ago we completed the last 9.0 CommitFest and released 9.0 Alpha 4. We are now working on a 9.0 open items list. There are relatively few open items compared to previous major releases because there are now more developers focused on closing open items.

Once we deal with all the items on that list, and any new items that appear, we can release the first 9.0 beta. Technically, we could release a beta before dealing with all open items as long as we are sure that none of the existing open items will require cluster reinitialization (initdb).

More Philadelphia Action

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:00:00 -0500

A month ago I mentioned a surprising number of Postgres activities in Philadelphia. One month later, those events are past but now there are more.

First, PG East is shaping up to be a big conference:

The conference agenda looks very full, with both developer and business-oriented talks. The business-oriented focus is rather new for Postgres conferences, and I think signals more mainstream adoption of Postgres.
It is at the Warwick Hotel. This lobby photo should give you a good idea of how nice the hotel is — we will simply have to adjust to having a Postgres conference in a fancy hotel.
Noel Yuhanna of Forrester Research will be speaking. He is the person who authored last year's Forrester Wave report that found Ingres and MySQL as the leading open source databases (news report). You can judge for yourself how much "research" went into that report, but we will be nice to him — a bodyguard will be unnecessary.

Why Blog?

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:00:00 -0500

With so many ways of electronically communicating in the Postgres community, why blog? I have thought about that question and want to list the various electronically communication methods and their advantages:

Email: Email is great for task-oriented communication. It reaches a large audience and allows for deliberate, consensus-oriented solutions.

Python Driver Confusion

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:00:00 -0500

A few weeks ago I learned there was serious confusion over the client-side Python drivers available for Postgres. This chart shows many Python drivers, but the recommended libpq-based driver, Psycopg, was listed on the chart as GPL licensed. This would require programs that use the driver to also be GPL licensed. However, the license is not actually GPL but a complicated hybrid license.

Fortunately, the Psycopg author has agreed to relicense his Python driver under the LGPL in the next release, and there is hope that Postgres developers will get involved to help add any missing features to the driver.

Removal of Personal Copyrights

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:00:00 -0500

Postgres does not require copyright assignment from contributors because it is BSD licensed. Unlike the GPL, there is no enforcement component in the BSD license. When code and documentation are contributed to the project, the authors give the project the right to distribute their contributions under the BSD license. However, technically, authors also retain full rights to their contributions. Of course, there is little practical difference between retaining full rights and obtaining contributions under the BSD license.

Anyway, while all work submitted to Postgres is covered under the BSD license, the existence of individual copyright lines in our source code, e.g. © Joe Coder, makes company lawyers nervous, so we have a policy of avoiding such content. Unfortunately, this policy has been active only during the past five years and was not always universally enforced. For this reason, we occasionally have to ask authors for permission to remove their copyright lines, or in drastic cases, rewrite trivial code segments when the author cannot be contacted. We perform such cleanups periodically as the personal copyrights are brought to our attention, e.g. 2006, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010.

Postgres University Course Material

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:00:00 -0500

Leonard Shapiro of Portland State University has created some excellent Postgres university course material.

His first course, Introduction to Databases, teaches databases from a Postgres perspective. His higher-level course, Relational DMBS/Database Internals, covers many aspects of Postgres in greater detail than is covered in the Postgres manuals.

Where Did My Error Come From?

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:00:00 -0500

I am not sure people are aware that you can find the source code location of any generated server log message. When log_error_verbosity is set to 'verbose', additional details are output that can help diagnose errors. Specifically, I have added this to the Postgres 9.0 documentation:

VERBOSE output includes the SQLSTATE error code and the source code file name, function name, and line number that generated the error.

Caring for Your (PG) Introvert

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:00:00 -0500

Many computer programmers are introverts because they have chosen the solitary job of creating programs that accomplish specific tasks. Open source developers are probably even more prone to be introverts because the (boring?) meetings, office chit-chat, and lunch outings are mostly gone, with the only communication being via email, instant messaging, twitter, and blogs. Open source social interaction is certainly more controlled than traditional communication.

This excellent article describes introverts as generally misunderstood:

Wanted: New Project Slogan

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:00:00 -0500

On Monday Josh Berkus requested suggestions for a new Postgres slogan. Our current slogan, "The world's most advanced open source database", was chosen in the early years of the project to distinguish ourselves from other open source databases, and it is easy to see why we should consider a change at this time. The suggestions fit into several categories, some serious, some humorous. Continued discussion is taking place on the advocacy (pgsql-advocacy@postgresql.org) email list.

General

PostgreSQL: The Elephant Never Forgets
PostgreSQL: Enjoy Your Database Again
PostgreSQL: The Professional Database Solution
PostgreSQL: Meet the Future
PostgreSQL: It Simply Works