Simon Willison’s Weblog

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109 items tagged “postgresql”

2013

Why is postgresql popular with django?

Partly because the first applications developed on Django (before it was even called Django) used PostgreSQL, so it’s had great PostgreSQL support baked in from the start.

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2012

What tools and techniques are used for relational database version control (structure and data)?

The term you are looking for is database migrations (sometimes called database change scripts).

[... 308 words]

2010

When should one switch from MySQL to Oracle or PostgreSQL?

When your own benchmarks prove that your application’s particular load characteristics will perform better on another database—and the difference is large enough that it’s worth the cost involved in retargeting your code. If that cost is high (and it probably will be) it may be worth paying for some expert consultants to ensure that your implementations against the different databases are properly optimised.

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MapOSMatic. Clever service built on top of OpenStreetMap, which renders double sided city maps with a map and grid on one size and an A-Z street name index on the other. Runs on top of Mapnik, PostGIS and Cairo, with a few thousand additional lines of Python and Django. # 11th July 2010, 12:15 pm

Appending the request URL to SQL statements in Django. A clever frame-walking monkey-patch which pulls the most recent HttpRequest object out of the Python stack and adds the current request.path to each SQL query as an SQL comment, so you can see it in debugging tools such as slow query logs and the PostgreSQL “select * from pg_stat_activity” query. # 2nd June 2010, 9:09 am

Doing things with Ordnance Survey OpenData. Jo Walsh’s guide to processing Ordnance Survey OpenData using PostgreSQL and PostGIS. # 20th May 2010, 3:22 pm

Installing GeoDjango Dependencies with Homebrew. brew update && brew install postgis && brew install gdal # 7th May 2010, 2:40 pm

PostgreSQL 9.0 Beta 1 Now Available. With asynchronous streaming replication. # 5th May 2010, 2:36 pm

grant XXX on * ? (via) PostgreSQL doesn’t have a way to say “this user is allowed to select/update/etc on all tables in database X”. That kind of sucks. UPDATE: This is fixed in PostgreSQL 9, see the comments. # 16th March 2010, 6:26 pm

jacobian’s django-deployment-workshop. Notes and resources from Jacob’s 3 hour Django deployment workshop at PyCon, including example configuration files for Apache2 + mod_wsgi, nginx, PostgreSQL and pgpool. # 19th February 2010, 2:28 pm

2009

PostgreSQL 8.5alpha3 now available. “Hot Standby, allowing read-only connections during recovery, provides a built-in master-slave replication solution.” Woohoo! # 23rd December 2009, 9:57 am

Django-Jython 1.0.0 released! Now with database backends for PostgreSQL, Oracle and MySQL. The next release (planned for next month) should provide full compatibility with Django 1.1—the current release has 1.1 support for PostgreSQL but only 1.0 support for the other two databases. # 9th November 2009, 1:53 pm

PostgreSQL 8.5 alpha 2 is out. “P.S. If you’re wondering about Hot Standby and Synchronous Replication, they’re still under heavy development and still (at this point) expected to be in 8.5.”—Hot Standby is PostgreSQL-speak for MySQL-style master/slave replication for scaling your reads. # 28th October 2009, 9:02 am

Londiste Tutorial. Master/slave replication for PostgreSQL, developed and used by Skype. # 9th September 2009, 11:06 pm

Mandelbrot set in PostgreSQL. Surprisingly short SQL statement that produces an ASCII art Mandelbrot set. # 13th August 2009, 2:23 pm

Install Django, GeoDjango, PostgreSQL and PostGIS on OSX Leopard. This tutorial worked perfectly for me. # 24th July 2009, 11:47 am

EveryBlock source code released. EveryBlock’s Knight Foundation grant required them to release the source code after two years, under the GPL. Lots of neat Django / PostgreSQL / GIS tricks to be found within. # 1st July 2009, 8:01 pm

PostgreSQL Development Priorities. The top two for 8.4 are “Simple built-in replication” and “Upgrade-in-place”, Josh Berkus is seeking feedback on priorities for future work on 8.5. # 28th May 2009, 8:08 pm

What happened to Hot Standby? Hot Standby (the ability to have read-only replication slaves) has been dropped from PostgreSQL 8.4 and is now scheduled for 8.5. “Making hard decisions to postpone features which aren’t quite ready is how PostgreSQL makes sure that our DBMS is ”bulletproof“ and that we release close to on-time every year”. # 8th March 2009, 9:28 am

The Django and Ubuntu Intrepid Almanac. Will Larson’s impressively comprehensive guide to configuring and securing an Ubuntu VPS from scratch to run Django, using PostgreSQL and Apache/mod_wsgi behind nginx. # 14th February 2009, 3:42 pm

2008

Represent. Andrei Scheinkman and Derek Willis describe how they built the NYTimes Represent feature using GeoDjango and PostGIS. # 29th December 2008, 10:10 pm

bpgsql. Barry Pederson’s pure Python PostgreSQL client library now ships with a Django backend. # 23rd September 2008, 11:42 am

Persistent Django on Amazon EC2 and EBS—the easy way. Useful tutorial on getting Django up and running on EC2 with EBS for a persistent PostgreSQL database. # 21st August 2008, 9:32 pm

Django Unit Tests and Transactions. If you’re using a transactional database engine (MySQL with InnoDB, Postgres or SQLite) you can speed things up by running each of your unit tests inside a transaction and rolling back in tearDown(). # 7th July 2008, 2:14 pm

Historically the project policy has been to avoid putting replication into core PostgreSQL, so as to leave room for development of competing solutions [...] However, it is becoming clear that this policy is hindering acceptance of PostgreSQL to too great an extent, compared to the benefit it offers to the add-on replication projects. Users who might consider PostgreSQL are choosing other database systems because our existing replication options are too complex to install and use for simple cases.

Tom Lane # 7th July 2008, 2:08 pm

Sun To Acquire MySQL. Sun also employ Josh Berkus, one of the lead developers of PostgreSQL. # 16th January 2008, 1:55 pm

2007

PostgreSQL 8.3 beta 4 release notes. In addition to the huge speed improvements, 8.3 adds support for XML, UUID and ENUM data types and brings full text (tsearch2) in to the core database engine. # 12th December 2007, 12:43 am

PostgreSQL 8.3 vs. 8.2—a simple benchmark. Stefan Kaltenbrunner reports a 2.2x speed increase for PostgreSQL 8.3 compared to 8.2 for a relatively simple benchmark. # 12th December 2007, 12:42 am

ThingDB. Another extensible key/value pair data store, constructed for the Open Library based on Aaron Swartz’s Infogami technology. # 17th July 2007, 10:21 am