Month: April 2013

Win a book contest – PostgreSQL Backup and Restore How-to

pg backup book cover

Around the time that Xzilla wrote about the book, Packt contacted me and asked for a review.

Since I generally don't really read technical books, I declined the offer, but Sandy from Packt was very persistent, and asked if I could inform about book giveaway contest.

The book is definitely PostgreSQL related, and Xzilla suggested to check it out, so here it goes:

Continue reading Win a book contest – PostgreSQL Backup and Restore How-to

Explaining the unexplainable

One of the first things new DBA hears is “Use the EXPLAIN". And upon first try he/she is greeted with incomprehensible:

                                                        QUERY PLAN
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Sort  (cost=146.63..148.65 ROWS=808 width=138) (actual TIME=55.009..55.012 ROWS=71 loops=1)
   Sort KEY: n.nspname, p.proname, (pg_get_function_arguments(p.oid))
   Sort Method: quicksort  Memory: 43kB
   ->  Hash JOIN  (cost=1.14..107.61 ROWS=808 width=138) (actual TIME=42.495..54.854 ROWS=71 loops=1)
         Hash Cond: (p.pronamespace = n.oid)
         ->  Seq Scan ON pg_proc p  (cost=0.00..89.30 ROWS=808 width=78) (actual TIME=0.052..53.465 ROWS=2402 loops=1)
               FILTER: pg_function_is_visible(oid)
         ->  Hash  (cost=1.09..1.09 ROWS=4 width=68) (actual TIME=0.011..0.011 ROWS=4 loops=1)
               Buckets: 1024  Batches: 1  Memory Usage: 1kB
               ->  Seq Scan ON pg_namespace n  (cost=0.00..1.09 ROWS=4 width=68) (actual TIME=0.005..0.007 ROWS=4 loops=1)
                     FILTER: ((nspname <> 'pg_catalog'::name) AND (nspname <> 'information_schema'::name))

What does it even mean?

Continue reading Explaining the unexplainable

Waiting for 9.3 – Support indexing of regular-expression searches in contrib/pg_trgm.

On 9th of April, Tom Lane committed patch:

Support indexing of regular-expression searches in contrib/pg_trgm.
 
This works by extracting trigrams from the given regular expression,
in generally the same spirit as the previously-existing support for
LIKE searches, though of course the details are far more complicated.
 
Currently, only GIN indexes are supported.  We might be able to make
it work with GiST indexes later.
 
The implementation includes adding API functions to backend/regex/
to provide a view of the search NFA created from a regular expression.
These functions are meant to be generic enough to be supportable in
a standalone version of the regex library, should that ever happen.
 
Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Heikki Linnakangas and Tom Lane

One day later Tom Lane added support for the same operations using GiST indexes (original patch was working only with GIN).

Continue reading Waiting for 9.3 – Support indexing of regular-expression searches in contrib/pg_trgm.

Waiting for 9.3 – Add \watch [SEC] command to psql.

On 4th of April, Tom Lane committed patch:

Add \watch [SEC] command to psql.
 
This allows convenient re-execution of commands.
 
Will Leinweber, reviewed by Peter Eisentraut, Daniel Farina, and Tom Lane

Continue reading Waiting for 9.3 – Add \watch [SEC] command to psql.