On 29th of January, Andrew Dunstan committed patch:
Add json_array_elements_text function. This was a notable omission from the json functions added in 9.3 and there have been numerous complaints about its absence. Laurence Rowe.
Continue reading Waiting for 9.4 – Add json_array_elements_text function.
On 28th of January, Andrew Dunstan committed patch:
New json functions. json_build_array() and json_build_object allow for the construction of arbitrarily complex json trees. json_object() turns a one or two dimensional array, or two separate arrays, into a json_object of name/value pairs, similarly to the hstore() function. json_object_agg() aggregates its two arguments into a single json object as name value pairs. Catalog version bumped. Andrew Dunstan, reviewed by Marko Tiikkaja.
So, couple of days ago, some guy, from Periscope company wrote a blogpost about getting number of distinct elements, per group, faster using subqueries.
This was then submitted to Hacker News and r/Programming on Reddit.
Then, the original authors submitted second blogpost comparing speed between four different DB engines. Which, in turn, was also commented on Reddit.
I found the numbers presented by Periscope (as their improvement) as not that great.
Unfortunately – their blog doesn't allow for comments, so I decided to test it, and write on my own blog, what I can find about it.
Continue reading Getting count of distinct elements, per group, in PostgreSQL.
On 28th of January, Fujii Masao committed patch:
Add pg_stat_archiver statistics view. This view shows the statistics about the WAL archiver process's activity. Gabriele Bartolini, reviewed by Michael Paquier, refactored a bit by me.
Continue reading Waiting for 9.4 – Add pg_stat_archiver statistics view.
On 25th of January, Heikki Linnakangas committed patch:
Add recovery_target='immediate' option. This allows ending recovery as a consistent state has been reached. Without this, there was no easy way to e.g restore an online backup, without replaying any extra WAL after the backup ended. MauMau and me.
Continue reading Waiting for 9.4 – Add recovery_target='immediate' option.
On 18th of January, Stephen Frost committed patch:
Add ALTER TABLESPACE ... MOVE command This adds a 'MOVE' sub-command to ALTER TABLESPACE which allows moving sets of objects from one tablespace to another. This can be extremely handy and avoids a lot of error-prone scripting. ALTER TABLESPACE ... MOVE will only move objects the user owns, will notify the user if no objects were found, and can be used to move ALL objects or specific types of objects (TABLES, INDEXES, or MATERIALIZED VIEWS).
He followed it, with another commit:
Add CREATE TABLESPACE ... WITH ... Options Tablespaces have a few options which can be set on them to give PG hints as to how the tablespace behaves (perhaps it's faster for sequential scans, or better able to handle random access, etc). These options were only available through the ALTER TABLESPACE command. This adds the ability to set these options at CREATE TABLESPACE time, removing the need to do both a CREATE TABLESPACE and ALTER TABLESPACE to get the correct options set on the tablespace. Vik Fearing, reviewed by Michael Paquier.
I am enthusiast of Bitcoins. This can be seen in my blog (above each post, in post view page, there is help plea), or on explain.depesz.com – my most known creation.
Aside from these, I try to talk with various people about it, explain what I can (and learn what I don't know), and generally provide positive (but hopefully not overly intrusive) channel of information.
The thing, though, was that so far I didn't actually use much of the currency. Bought test vpn once, and that's about it.
But recently, I got 0.07 btc donations for my depesz.com blogposts (thanks to whoever contributed), and since I learned that relatively close to me there is burger bar that accepts payments in bitcoins – decided to spend some of donation money 🙂
Long story short – been today to White Burger with my S.O., and we got ourselves burgers.
The place is relatively nice. In Warsaw/Ursynow. At the time we were there (around 1pm) it was empty. Rather comfortable, though not cozy. But – it's a bar, not a secluded restaurant, so it's ok.
Prices – rather good. Been in couple of other burger bars in Warsaw, and this was below the average (if memory serves right).
Food – taste was great. I think these are in fact best burgers I had in Warsaw. Like them much more than the famous “Burger Bar" on Olkuska. There were two small(ish) issues, though. One – two (out of three) burgers had a bit cold buns. Not a big problem, but still easily fixable. The other problem was that kitchen mixed up sauces in the burgers. My wife got her burger, with bacon, but with my sauce – tabasco with some additions. This could have been much more problematic, but luckily she managed to eat it. The worst part, but easily avoidable, was coffee – if the owner of the place reads it – please check/fix the coffee machine.
Now for the interesting part. Bitcoin payment. It worked. Cashier (very nice, young lady) didn't know what to do when transaction was showed as “unconfirmed" (it was waiting for 6 blockchain confirmations), but since we were eating in the bar, it was not a problem. She seemed genuinely interested on what's going on, and how it works, and, despite not being sure what to do about unconfirmed transaction, provided us with the food without any delay. Thanks a lot.
I think this is definitely a moment to start a company that would take some of the risk involved in BTC and early confirming for faster confirmations in exchange for small fee.
TL;DR: Bought burgers with bitcoins, in White Burger, Warsaw, Poland. Burgers were great (small issues aside). BTC payment took too long, but it can be improved.
On 23rd of December, Tom Lane committed patch:
Support ordered-set (WITHIN GROUP) aggregates. This patch introduces generic support for ordered-set and hypothetical-set aggregate functions, as well as implementations of the instances defined in SQL:2008 (percentile_cont(), percentile_disc(), rank(), dense_rank(), percent_rank(), cume_dist()). We also added mode() though it is not in the spec, as well as versions of percentile_cont() and percentile_disc() that can compute multiple percentile values in one pass over the data. Unlike the original submission, this patch puts full control of the sorting process in the hands of the aggregate's support functions. To allow the support functions to find out how they're supposed to sort, a new API function AggGetAggref() is added to nodeAgg.c. This allows retrieval of the aggregate call's Aggref node, which may have other uses beyond the immediate need. There is also support for ordered-set aggregates to install cleanup callback functions, so that they can be sure that infrastructure such as tuplesort objects gets cleaned up. In passing, make some fixes in the recently-added support for variadic aggregates, and make some editorial adjustments in the recent FILTER additions for aggregates. Also, simplify use of IsBinaryCoercible() by allowing it to succeed whenever the target type is ANY or ANYELEMENT. It was inconsistent that it dealt with other polymorphic target types but not these. Atri Sharma and Andrew Gierth; reviewed by Pavel Stehule and Vik Fearing, and rather heavily editorialized upon by Tom Lane
Continue reading Waiting for 9.4 – Support ordered-set (WITHIN GROUP) aggregates.
On 20th of December, Robert Haas committed patch:
pg_prewarm, a contrib module for prewarming relationd data. Patch by me. Review by Álvaro Herrera, Amit Kapila, Jeff Janes, Gurjeet Singh, and others.
Continue reading Waiting for 9.4 – pg_prewarm, a contrib module for prewarming relationd data.
On 18th of December, Tatsuo Ishii committed patch:
Add ALTER SYSTEM command to edit the server configuration file. Patch contributed by Amit Kapila. Reviewed by Hari Babu, Masao Fujii, Boszormenyi Zoltan, Andres Freund, Greg Smith and others.
On the next day, Fujii Masao committed patch:
Add tab completion for ALTER SYSTEM SET in psql.
Continue reading Waiting for 9.4 – Add ALTER SYSTEM command to edit the server configuration file.