Month: June 2012

How to get shortest connection between two cities

Yesterday, on #postgresql on irc some guy asked:

22:28 < rafasc> i am trying to use plpgsql to find the shortest path between two cities, each pair of cities has one or more edges, each edge has a different wheight.
22:28 < rafasc> Is there a easy way to compute the shortest path between two cities?

Well, I was not really in a mood to solve it, so I just told him to try with recursive queries, and went on my way.

But I thought about it. And decided to see if I can write the query.

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How to send mail from database?

Similar question has been asked many times on mailing lists and on IRC. Sometimes it's not mail sending, but file/directory creation, or something else that generally requires some interaction with “world outside of database".

Can it be done? Sure. How, then?

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How much RAM is PostgreSQL using?

(disclaimer: all the data and examples in here are on Linux – the same data can be probably obtained on other systems too, it's just that I work on Linux and don't know other systems well).

This question pops occasionally in various places – PostgreSQL is using too much memory, why is that, and how can it be mitigated?

Before we can go to “optimizing", we should understand the problem. But do we? Both standard tools – ps and top – lie. How/why? Let's see.

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“= 123” vs. “= ‘depesz'”. What is faster?

There is this idea that normal form in databases require you to use integer, auto incrementing, primary keys.

The idea was discussed by many people, I will just point you to series of three blog posts on the subject by Josh Berkus ( part 1, 2 and 3, and reprise).

One of the points that proponents of surrogate keys (i.e. those based on integer and sequences) raise is that comparing integers is faster than comparing texts. So,

SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 123

is faster than

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = 'depesz'

Is it?

Continue reading “= 123" vs. “= ‘depesz'". What is faster?