Month: February 2022

PGDayPL is coming :)

Following is text provided by organizers. On my end I can say that I'll be there, and I'm on “Talk selection team" 🙂

The first ever Polish PostgreSQL conference is approaching faster than we think.

On April 22, 2022, we invite you to spend the whole day gaining top technical knowledge and broadening your horizons. PGDayPL 2022 is a great gaining opportunity to talk to the amazing speakers and spend time in the accompaniment of what we are most passionate about.

The conference is held at the POLIN Conference Center in Warsaw's Muranów.

What can you expect?

  • fantastic lectures where you will gain technical knowledge – in both Polish and English!
  • panels led by people with a passion for PostgreSQL and IT
  • gifts for all conference attendees and additional bonuses for our speakers
  • delicious catering for guests
  • integration meeting after a successful conference

Learn more: https://pgday.pl/.

explain.depesz.com – now with HINTS!

I just pushed change to explain.depesz.com that allows for processing and displaying hints for plans.

For example, take a look at this plan, and check if you'll notice subtle “HINTS" tab.

In there you will see example hints – one about sort and memory, and the other about missing index.

It is not much, but it's a step in (hopefully) right direction, when the explain tool will also provide, automatically, some ideas on what to do to make the thing faster.

Hope you'll find it useful.

How much disk space you can save by using INT4/INT instead of INT8/BIGINT?

Lately there have been couple of discussions on IRC, Slack, and Reddit that showed that people assume that by using int4/integer they use 4 bytes less than they would in case of int8/bigint. This is not really the case. Let me explain why.

Continue reading How much disk space you can save by using INT4/INT instead of INT8/BIGINT?

Waiting for PostgreSQL 15 – Allow archiving via loadable modules.

On 3rd of February 2022, Robert Haas committed patch:

Allow archiving via loadable modules.
 
Running a shell command for each file to be archived has a lot of
overhead and may not offer as much error checking as you want, or the
exact semantics that you want. So, offer the option to call a loadable
module for each file to be archived, rather than running a shell command.
 
Also, add a 'basic_archive' contrib module as an example implementation
that archives to a local directory.
 
Nathan Bossart, with a little bit of kibitzing by me.
 
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/20220202224433.GA1036711@nathanxps13

Continue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 15 – Allow archiving via loadable modules.

Waiting for PostgreSQL 15 – Add UNIQUE null treatment option

On 3rd of February 2022, Peter Eisentraut committed patch:

Add UNIQUE null treatment option 
 
The SQL standard has been ambiguous about whether null values in
unique constraints should be considered equal or not.  Different
implementations have different behaviors.  In the SQL:202x draft, this
has been formalized by making this implementation-defined and adding
an option on unique constraint definitions UNIQUE [ NULLS [NOT]
DISTINCT ] to choose a behavior explicitly.
 
This patch adds this option to PostgreSQL.  The default behavior
remains UNIQUE NULLS DISTINCT.  Making this happen in the btree code
is pretty easy; most of the patch is just to carry the flag around to
all the places that need it.
 
The CREATE UNIQUE INDEX syntax extension is not from the standard,
it's my own invention.
 
I named all the internal flags, catalog columns, etc. in the negative
("nulls not distinct") so that the default PostgreSQL behavior is the
default if the flag is false.
 
Reviewed-by: Maxim Orlov <orlovmg@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Pavel Borisov <pashkin.elfe@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/84e5ee1b-387e-9a54-c326-9082674bde78@enterprisedb.com

Continue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 15 – Add UNIQUE null treatment option