Leo Hsu and Regina Obe: PostGIS 1.4 hot on the heels of PostgreSQL 8.4

By kkuro | July 4, 2009

PostgreSQL 8.4 has come out, and while I am a bit disappointed that PostGIS 1.4 has not come out for fear that we've missed a bit of the PostgreSQL 8.4 momentum, I am happy that we are nearing closer and just maybe we'll have it out by end next week. We now have a PostGIS 1.4RC1 http://postgis.refractions.net/download/postgis-1.4.0rc1.tar.gz tar ball as well as experimental binary builds of this for windows user's running PostgreSQL 8.3 http://postgis.refractions.net/download/windows/pg83/experimental/postgis/ or PostgreSQL 8.4 http://postgis.refractions.net/download/windows/pg84/experimental/postgis/. Please give both a try.

Working in the Cathedral Really?

As Paul duly noted in his blog entry Working in the Cathedral the model for PostGIS development is morphing, but I wouldn't call this morphing process one that is entirely toward the Cathedral model. Unlike the perceived Cathedral model, I would like to think we will have more frequent releases and beta releases, perhaps parallel experimental builds and most importantly, more fun. The main idea being making it much easier for mere mortals and fake mortals to taste test the cookies in the oven while they are cooking. By fake I mean unit tests, build bots, and computer generated people where the fear of destruction is removed. I feel this is the similar model PostgreSQL goes by or is trying to achieve.


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PostGIS 1.4 hot on the heels of PostgreSQL 8.4

By kkuro |
PostgreSQL 8.4 has come out, and while I am a bit disappointed that PostGIS 1.4 has not come out for fear that we've missed a bit of the PostgreSQL 8.4 momentum, I am happy that we are nearing closer and just maybe we'll have it out by end next week. We now have a PostGIS 1.4RC1 http://postgis.refractions.net/download/postgis-1.4.0rc1.tar.gz tar ball as well as experimental binary builds of this for windows user's running PostgreSQL 8.3 http://postgis.refractions.net/download/windows/pg83/e Tags:

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Hubert Lubaczewski: Waiting for 8.5 – let’s start

By kkuro |
Everybody wrote that 8.4 was released, so it’s not a news now. But. Starting from yesterday, my own PostgreSQL reports it’s version like this: # select version(); [...] Tags: ,

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Peter Eisentraut: Do you have a good idea for PostgreSQL?

By kkuro |

Do you have a feature request or a good idea for how to improve PostgreSQL? Subscribing to a mailing list is too cumbersome? Or you did subscribe to a mailing list and presented your idea there, and now it's rotting in the archives or on the todo list? Let's try something different.

I have set up a feedback forum over at UserVoice. There you can enter your ideas, comment and vote on other suggestions, and see what the top requests are, without the overhead of tracking a mailing list every day. Let's consider this an experiment. It is not going to replace the existing project communication channels, and you shouldn't send bug reports or engage in coding discussions there. But the more people raise their "user voice" there and provide useful suggestions and comments, the more useful it might become.

To try it, go to: http://postgresql.uservoice.com/

The floodgates are open for development on PostgreSQL 8.5, so now is the time to make yourself heard.

(Disclaimer: UserVoice is a commercial company. I am not associated with them. This is just an attempt to find better interfaces for user feedback.)

(picture by NoNo^Q8 CC-BY)
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Basic Webapp Clone

By kkuro | July 3, 2009
Basic “www static ice com au” clone. To Create or Assist me Create. ( Post What you are offering with Bid) Basic engine that can acheave similar results to staticice. Basic Scraping / PHP (or ruby) / Database Manipulation Oly need to pull results from under 10 sites,though, would like option to expand. There is a chance that the successful bidder will be invited to return for further development after this simple project is delivered. Open to all ideas, CMS systems or Open source solut Tags:

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PremiumSoft introduces Navicat Premium - Cross DB Admin & Migration GUI

By kkuro |
PremiumSoft has released Navicat Premium, their cross database admin and migration interface for Mac OS X. Navicat Premium combines all Navicat versions in an ultimate version and can connect MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL. Navicat Premium allows the user to drag and drop tables and data from Oracle to MySQL, PostgreSQL to MySQL, Oracle to PostgreSQL and vice versa within a single client. Also, batch jobs for different databases can also be scheduled and automated. Tags:

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Josh Tolley: Nigeria PostgreSQL Training: Day 1

By kkuro |

I am in Lagos, Nigeria this morning, preparing for a half-day car ride to Akure in Ondo State. I'll be spending the next seven days with programmers from Ondo state, who are six months or so away from deploying a system to provide government-provided services using a centralized card system. They are designing their database using PostgreSQL!

Ondo state has a little over 3 million people, and plans to integrate a half-dozen government services under the centralized data system. They conducted a census in 2006, and will be using their new system to gather data yearly going forward.

Their plan is extremely ambitious, given obstacles like lack of power in most of the rural areas, and social issues like people not wanting to give accurate information about themselves to the government. Some biometric information, like finger prints, will be gathered electronically using special machines that they will primarily lease (instead of buying - significant cost savings), and these machines require power. They have been specially outfitted with dry-cell batteries, that operate for about 8 hours before needing to be recharged.

For the social problems around data collection, a marketing campaign to explain exactly what benefits those who provide accurate information are entitled to. After I mentioned to my host the American aversion to centralized government identification cards, he explained that in Nigeria they had the same issue. In addition to the marketing on TV, radio, newspapers and even leaflets, data collection volunteers will be trained on exactly how to collect accurate information. I am looking forward to having a look at the surveys and data collection strategy.

Otherwise, I've had a lot of fun talking with people. My car trip from the airport and remaining evening was mostly spent with me making funny vocabulary errors (tshirt == vest - who knew?), and explaining that Americans were mourning and in shock just like Nigerians because of Michael Jackson's death. I made an offhand comment about the number of people walking around outside at dusk because a friend had said a similar thing about Portland, OR's nightlife, and my escort commented on how peaceful and free people are in Lagos.

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Andrew Dunstan: Parallel pg_restore for PostgreSQL 8.4

By kkuro |
I try to complete at least one significant feature item per PostgreSQL release. This time the feature is making pg_restore run in parallel. This is quite important for many users, particularly some large enterprise users.

It's important that people understand what this will do and what it won't do. pg_restores runs a number of steps. In conventional mode it simply runs them all in a single connection to the database, one after the other. In parallel mode it first runs all the quick and easy steps, essentially those that don't involve any data access, such as table and function creation, in a single connection, just like conventional mode. Then it runs the remaining steps each in its own connection. The steps are the same, and there is no parallelism within a given step. For example, a single COPY to a table is not parallelised. Rather, we run it in parallel with other data intensive steps.

The maximum amount of parellelism is controlled by the user. This will involve some experimentation to get to the sweet spot for your setup. A good place to start is the number of physical processors you have available. The idea here is to improve the situation where the CPU is the limiting factor, and allow you to drive the restoration rate up to where IO is in fact the limiting factor. With very high end hardware we believe that you can drive the parallelism quite high.

Like many performance features, this one might well require several releases to tweak it for optimal performance gain. The program works by keeping a pool of slots to be used for the steps that are run in parallel. One possible area for improvement is in the algorithm that selects the item to be used for a slot as it it becomes available. Currently we keep a queue of items that have no remaining unrestored dependencies. An item gets put on the queue as soon as all the items it depends on have been restored. This is likely to be a fairly good approximation of an optimal algorithm, but there might well be a way of tweaking it. Another possible area of optimsation would be to take some notice of the tablespace that each item affects, and try to balance these, so we use as many IO channels as possible.

What is important is that we have now got the basic framework of parallel restore, so that some researchers can easily experiment with various tweaks to improve the performance.

pg_restore is going to be with us for quite a long time. Even if we manage to get pg_upgrade working pretty well, that will take quite a bit of time, and there is currently no guarantee that it will for for every release. So I expect pg_restore to be the most common method of upgrading for quite some time, making it run as fast as possible is thus still a significant requirement.

I'm proud to have been able to contribute this feature to Postgres, and look forward to other people improving it further as time goes by. Tags: ,

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The Proper Way To Use UTF-8 (PHP/MySQL)

By kkuro |
After living in Japan for six years and doing web programming for most of that time, you would think I would have this down by now. I used many combos - from Lasso/FileMaker to PHP/MSSQL and even PHP/PostgreSQL - but never used PHP/MySQL for any CJVK work.  So I did some Googling and found four pages that claimed to have the answer: Use UTF-8 No BOM for each page. That is Byte-Order Mark , which does help in other languages like Cold Fusion, but not for me in PHP. NOPE! Use a PHP header ta Tags:

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Peter Eisentraut: Where have all the translations gone?

By kkuro |

If you have downloaded PostgreSQL 8.4.0 and are wondering where so many of the translations have gone: The translation team has decided not to ship translations anymore that are not translated at least about 80%. (See the commit message for the list of victims.) This is so that incidental users of stale translations are not presented with a confusing and distracting mix of translated and untranslated messages all the time. So right now we are only shipping a full or almost full set of translations into German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese, and Turkish.

To get the translations into other languages back into the release, go to http://babel.postgresql.org/ and start submitting updates. Updates may be included as early as release 8.4.1 in a few months.

I hope in particular that we might get the Chinese, Italian, and Russian translations back into shape.

By the way, if you want to start (or continue) translating, I suggest that you approximately follow this priority order: libpq, psql, pgscripts, pg_dump, initdb, postgres. This or a similar order will make the translations useful to the most users with the least amount of work.
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