Simon Willison’s Weblog

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 / postgresql, replication, hotstandby, josh-berkus, scaling, databases

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 / apache, modwsgi, postgresql, nginx, django, ubuntu, vps, sysadmin, will-larson

Represent. Andrei Scheinkman and Derek Willis describe how they built the NYTimes Represent feature using GeoDjango and PostGIS.

# 29th December 2008, 10:10 pm / derek-willis, andreischeinkman, new-york-times, django, geodjango, python, postgresql, postgis, gis

bpgsql. Barry Pederson’s pure Python PostgreSQL client library now ships with a Django backend.

# 23rd September 2008, 11:42 am / python, postgresql, django, barry-pederson, bpgsql

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 / aws, ec2, amazon, ebs, django, python, postgresql

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 / unittesting, unittest, python, django, transactions, innodb, mysql, sqlite, postgresql

Sun To Acquire MySQL. Sun also employ Josh Berkus, one of the lead developers of PostgreSQL.

# 16th January 2008, 1:55 pm / mysql, postgresql, sunmicrosystems, sun, tim-oreilly, databases, open-source, josh-berkus

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 / tsearch2, postgresql, fulltext, xml, uuid, enum, databases, beta

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 / stefankaltenbrunner, postgresql, benchmarks

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 / infogami, openlibrary, aaron-swartz, thingdb, python, postgresql

PostgreSQL for Mac (via) Looks like a great way of getting PostgreSQL up and running on a Mac.

# 10th July 2007, 8:24 am / postgresql, osx, mac

Rails and Scaling with Multiple Databases. Ryan Tomayko explains how his team spreads a high traffic Rails application across five separate PostgreSQL databases by giving each client their own schema—similar to how WordPress MU scales.

# 14th April 2007, 2:32 am / wordpress, ryan-tomayko, scaling, rails, postgresql

pg8000 v1.02. The pure Python PostgreSQL library now supports DB-API 2.0 (and SSL too). That didn’t take long!

# 13th March 2007, 9:18 pm / postgresql, dbapi, pg8000, python

pg8000 (via) A pure-Python interface to PostgreSQL, using the PostgreSQL network protocol directly. Doesn’t (yet) support DB-API 2.0, but that’s promised in a future release.

# 9th March 2007, 7:35 pm / postgresql, python, pg8000

DHS Funding Open Source Security. Paying for “source code analysis technology” coverage of Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL and more.

# 17th January 2006, 10:18 pm / security, open-source, dhs, linux, apache, postgresql

Performance Tuning PostgreSQL (via) Anything Frank has to say about PostgreSQL is well worth listening to.

# 13th December 2005, 8:11 am / postgresql

Providing Application Access to SQL Data in Apple Remote Desktop 2 (via) Interesting—Apple’s Remote Desktop 2 runs off a PostgreSQL database.

# 3rd March 2005, 10:28 am / apple, postgresql

PostgreSQL: What’s New in 8.0. Win32 server, savepoints, tablespaces, plperl and more.

# 19th January 2005, 4:11 pm / postgresql

PostgreSQL startup items for MacOS X (via) Thank you! I’ve been wanting this for months.

# 8th September 2004, 6:06 pm / postgresql, macosx

Implementing Full Text Indexing with PostgreSQL (via) TSearch2 tutorial.

# 13th August 2004, 3:44 pm / postgresql, search

PostgreSQL 8.0.0 Officially Goes Beta (via) New features include win32 support, point-in-time recovery.

# 10th August 2004, 6:17 pm / postgresql

Tablespaces (via) Interesting new feature in PostgreSQL 7.5.

# 9th July 2004, 5:58 am / postgresql

PostgreSQL Hardware Performance Tuning. For future reference.

# 22nd April 2004, 6:33 pm / postgresql

Finding open locks on Postgresql. May come in useful in the future.

# 26th February 2004, 2:33 am / postgresql