PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop - December 2024

Next month, I'll be hosting a discussion of Melanie Plageman's talk, Intro to Postgres Planner, given at PGCon 2019. You can sign up using this form. To be clear, the talk is not an introduction to how the planner works from a user perspective, but rather how to hack on it and try to make it better and perhaps get your improvements committed to PostgreSQL. If you're interested, please join us. I anticipate that both Melanie and I will be present for the discussions.

Why pg_dump Is Amazing

I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago entitled Is pg_dump a Backup Tool?. In that post, I argued in the affirmative, but also said that it's probably shouldn't be your primary backup mechanism. For that, you probably shouldn't directly use anything that is included in PostgreSQL itself, but rather a well-maintained third-party backup tool such as barman or pgbackrest. But today, I want to talk a little more about why I believe that pg_dump is both amazingly useful for solving all kinds of PostgreSQL-related problems and also just a great piece of technology.

PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop - November 2024

Next month, I'll be hosting a discussion of a talk by Andy Pavlo, given for his Intro to Database Systems course at CMU. The title of the talk is "Memory & Disk I/O Management and the video link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoewwZwVmv4. As usual, we have will have three sessions, and you can sign up to participate in one of them using this form.

Is pg_dump a Backup Tool?

Recently, I've been hearing a lot of experienced PostgreSQL users reiterate this line: "pg_dump is not a backup tool." In fact, the documentation has recently been updated to avoid saying that it is a backup tool, to widespread relief. Experienced PostgreSQL users and developers have been publicly called out for having the temerity to assert that pg_dump is, in fact, a backup tool. I find this narrative deeply frustrating, for two reasons.

PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop - October 2024

This month, I'll be hosting a discussion of Thomas Munro's 2024.pgconf.dev talk, Streaming I/O and vectored I/O. As usual, there will be three sessions, and you can use this form to sign up for the session you prefer. However, if you do want to attend, please sign up right away, because our first session is scheduled for this Thursday.

PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop - September 2024

Our talk for September 2024 will is by Andrey Borodin on his Youtube Channel "Byte Relay." The talk is Walk-through of Implementing Simple Postgres Patch: From sources to CI. I picked this talk for two reasons: first, in the poll I ran in the PostgreSQL Hacker Mentoring Discord, it got almost as many votes as the talk we did this month on the query planner. Second, I wanted to have at least some content that was targeted toward newer developers.

Posting Your Patch On pgsql-hackers

Sometimes, people post patches to pgsql-hackers and... nothing happens. No replies, no reviews, nothing. Other times, people post to patches to pgsql-hackers and a bunch of discussion ensues, but nothing gets committed. If you're the sort of person who likes to write patches for PostgreSQL, or if you're being paid to do so, you'd probably like to avoid having these things happen to you. In this blog post, I'm going to explain what I think you should do maximize the chances of a good outcome (no guarantees!).