Announcing PostgreSQL 9.2 Beta 1

Just because Postgres is rock-solid as soon as it hits Beta… Doesn’t mean you should go live with it until it’s GA.

http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1395/

http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/9/the-instagram-architecture-facebook-bought-for-a-cool-billio.html

pg_stat_activity has changed folks, and it seems for the better.  A cosmetic change, along with a powerful new view into the heart of your database are going to revolutionize the way that you view your database…. and probably break your existing monitoring scripts (unless you keep-a-readin’)….

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Seems to me that the tech dweebs at Twitter are on to something here that make sense for the industry.

http://blog.twitter.com/2012/04/introducing-innovators-patent-agreement.html

PGDay in NYC was a great success!  Great talks and great networking opportunities were plentiful.  A special shout-out to Jonathan Katz at Exco ventures and Jim Mlodgenski at CirruSQL for setting it up.  Well done guys!

This surely doesn’t suck.

http://tpostgres.org

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/03/opinion/pelosi-women-africa-democracy

Not all aspects of this mission have been a failure, but… it is pretty clearly time to bring most all of the troops home NOW. We went in with mostly noble & good intentions to make the world a better and safer place. Seems perhaps we did more harm than good and were in need of re-learning the history of the area. What is clear now is that the Afghan people must take responsisbility for their own future.

As a followup to my previous blog entry, I want to show queries that allow users to analyze TOAST tables. First, we find the TOAST details about the test heap table:

SELECT oid, relname, reltoastrelid, reltoastidxid FROM pg_class where relname = 'test';
  oid  | relname | reltoastrelid | reltoastidxid
-------+---------+---------------+---------------
 17172 | test    |         17175 |             0

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Many things are better toasted: cheese sandwiches, nuts, marshmallows. Even some of your Postgres data is better toasted — let me explain.

Postgres typically uses an eight-kilobyte block size — you can verify this by running pg_controldata:

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