Tag: stackoverflow

PostgreSQL + Perl + Unicode == confusion. Why?

Yesterday I had an interesting discussion on irc.

A guy wanted to know why Perl script is causing problems when dealing with Pg
and unicode characters.

The discussion went sideways, I got (a bit) upset, and had to leave anyway, so
I didn't finish it. But it did bother me, as for me the reasons of the problem
seem obvious, yet the person I talked with was very adamant that I have the
whole thing wrong.

So, I figured I'll use my blog to elaborate a bit…

Continue reading PostgreSQL + Perl + Unicode == confusion. Why?

Find cheapest combination of rooms in hotels

Today, on Stack Overflow there was interesting question.

Generally, given table that looks like this:

room | people | price   | hotel
 1   |    1   |   200   |   A
 2   |    2   |   99    |   A
 3   |    3   |   95    |   A
 4   |    1   |   90    |   B
 5   |    6   |   300   |   B

Find cheapest combination of rooms that would accomodate given number of guests.

Continue reading Find cheapest combination of rooms in hotels

Getting session variables without touching postgresql.conf

This post has been updated with new code that uses temporary table – the code is at the end of post!

There was this question on Stack Overflow.

For future reference: guy asked how to do session variables – i.e. something he could define once in session, and later reuse in standard sql queries – without modifying postgresql.conf – so usage of custom_variable_classes is forbidden 🙂

While I don't actually see why somebody would want to avoid modifying its postgresql.conf (short of “it's shared hosting and I don't have superuser privileges"), I thought that it will be rather simple, and at the same time, rather interesting.

So, let's do it:

Continue reading Getting session variables without touching postgresql.conf