Simon Willison’s Weblog

Transactionally Staged Job Drains in Postgres. Any time I see people argue that relational databases shouldn’t be used to implement job queues I think of this post by Brandur from 2017. If you write to a queue before committing a transaction you run the risk of a queue consumer trying to read from the database before the new row becomes visible. If you write to the queue after the transaction there’s a risk an error might result in your message never being written. So: write to a relational staging table as part of the transaction, then have a separate process read from that table and write to the queue. # 18th December 2021, 1:34 am

Per-project PostgreSQL (via) Jamey Sharp describes an ingenious way of setting up PostgreSQL instances for each of your local development project, without depending on an always-running shared localhost database server. The trick is a shell script which creates a PGDATA folder in the current folder and then instantiates a PostgreSQL server in --single single user mode which listens on a Unix domain socket in that folder, instead of listening on the network. Jamey then uses direnv to automatically configure that PostgreSQL, initializing the DB if necessary, for each of his project folders. # 3rd September 2021, 3:06 am

PostgreSQL: nbtree/README (via) The PostgreSQL source tree includes beatifully written README files for different parts of PostgreSQL. Here’s the README for their btree implementation—it continues to be actively maintained (last change was is March) and “git blame” shows that parts of the file date back 25 years, to 1996! # 25th June 2021, 6:09 pm

Hierarchical Structures in PostgreSQL (via) Two techniques I hadn’t seen before: the first is to define a materialized view using a CTE that offers efficient tree queries against a PostgreSQL array of path components (plus a trigger to update the materialized view), the second is with the PostgreSQL ltree extension which ships as part of PostgreSQL and hence should be widely available. # 25th June 2021, 5:19 pm

Multi-region PostgreSQL on Fly (via) Really interesting piece of architectural design from Fly here. Fly can run your application (as a Docker container run using Firecracker) in multiple regions around the world, and they’ve now quietly added PostgreSQL multi-region support. The way it works is that all-but-one region can have a read-only replica, and requests sent to application servers can perform read-only queries against their local region’s replica. If a request needs to execute a SQL update your application code can return a “fly-replay: region=scl” HTTP header and the Fly CDN will transparently replay the request against the region containing the leader database. This also means you can implement tricks like setting a 10s expiring cookie every time the user performs a write, such that their requests in the next 10s will go straight to the leader and avoid them experiencing any replication lag that hasn’t caught up with their latest update. # 17th June 2021, 6:39 pm

explain.dalibo.com (via) By far the best tool I’ve seen for turning the output of PostgreSQL EXPLAIN ANALYZE into something I can actually understand—produces a tree visualization which includes clear explanations of what each step (such as a “Index Only Scan Node”) actually means. # 28th May 2021, 5:41 pm

Practical SQL for Data Analysis (via) This is a really great SQL tutorial: it starts with the basics, but quickly moves on to a whole array of advanced PostgreSQL techniques—CTEs, window functions, efficient sampling, rollups, pivot tables and even linear regressions executed directly in the database using regr_slope(), regr_intercept() and regr_r2(). I picked up a whole bunch of tips for things I didn’t know you could do with PostgreSQL here. # 4th May 2021, 3:11 am

Fuzzy Name Matching in Postgres. Paul Ramsey describes how to implement fuzzy name matching in PostgreSQL using the fuzzystrmatch extension and its levenshtein() and soundex() functions, plus functional indexes to query against indexed soundex first and then apply slower Levenshtein. The same tricks should also work against SQLite using the datasette-jellyfish plugin. # 22nd February 2021, 9:16 pm

Cleaning Up Your Postgres Database (via) Craig Kerstiens provides some invaluable tips on running an initial check of the health of a PostgreSQL database, by using queries against the pg_statio_user_indexes table to find the memory cache hit ratio and the pg_stat_user_tables table to see what percentage of queries to your tables are using an index. # 3rd February 2021, 7:32 am