Weekly tweet digest for 2010-05-30

twittering on 2010-05-28

twittering on 2010-05-28

PgCon 2010 – PL/Parrot, Simulated Annealing, Exclusion Constraints, Postgres-XC

PgCon this year was full of bold ideas, delivered in the quiet manner typical of the Postgres community. Talks by Jonathan Leto, Jan Urbanski and Jeff Davis all presented new features and ideas that show there is so much room yet in Postgres as a project to contribute, and innovate. I was also delighted to see Postgres-XC (touted as a “Postgres RAC”) release code, and give a great presentation on the high-level details.

Jonathan Leto presented work on PL/Parrot, along with David Fetter. Parrot is a dynamic language virtual machine, allowing implementation of multiple dynamic languages which can then share classes (from the docs: “In theory, you will be able to write a class in Perl, subclass it in Python and then instantiate and use that subclass in a Tcl program.”). The project is to embed Parrot in PostgreSQL, and eventually, implement dynamic languages inside the virtual machine. Advantages to doing this are that it will make implementing new dynamic languages in Postgres much easier, because the language implementers won’t have to learn the PL interface. Another useful feature in PL/Parrot is the implementation of a security opcode in Parrot which essentially controls access to open(), a key to implementing a secure procedural language in Postgres. (I’m sure Jonathan will correct me if I didn’t describe this properly :D)

Jan Urbanski gave a talk on join ordering via Simulated Annealing, called Replacing GEQO. The approach was pretty interesting, involved math that required me to scratch my head a bit, and the initial performance improvements for many-join queries made it seem appealing. The original -hackers posting from Jan, includes a few hairy queries from Andres Freund which confound the GEQO referenced later in the thread. Jan’s posted the code, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops this year.

Jeff Davis presented exclusion constraints, which are part of 9.0. He is continuing his work on temporal data types with a clever and very useful generalization of UNIQUE. UNIQUE constrains equality, while exclusion constraints allow other operators (in the most cited example, Jeff demonstrates “overlaps” in the PERIOD datatype).

Postgres-XC was officially presented and released. For efforts in Postgres clustering, releasing the code is a huge step forward toward mainstreaming work in the community on clustering. This release solidifies community work that started last year, with NTT and the support of the Japanese PostgreSQL User Group in having a clustering summit back in November 2009.

I was disappointed to miss a few talks (like hypothetical indexes, pg_statsinfo, CB’s pgMQ) but looking forward to hearing the recordings as they are published!

Weekly tweet digest for 2010-05-23

  • Oh hello, nasal congestion of doom. Could this be the tree's revenge? #
  • i want someone to make a "leave diaspora alone" video. #
  • And off we go: Change in the air http://bit.ly/a4tpGd #
  • CivicIdeas meetup May 27th – Join us! http://tinyurl.com/2bvh79r #
  • Plowed through a bunch of @osbridge email, have an awesome exciting sponsorship announcement for tomorrow, and almost packed for #pgcon #
  • off to #pgcon #
  • We're doing it again! PDXPUG Day at OSCON: http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/1630 (via @pdxpug) #
  • Will be arriving about 7 hours early to Ottawa! Looking forward to seeing everyone before the dev meeting! #standbyftw #pgcon #
  • Made it to Ottawa. Assuming I'll end up at the royal oak. #pgcon #
  • /me just shook Marc Fournier's hand. #pgcon #
  • all Gregs have arrived at the developer meeting. #pgcon #
  • Rousing approval for alpha release process! yay for @petereisentraut and others who worked on making this happen last year #pgcon #
  • CVS to GIT throwdown about to start. #pgcon #
  • OMG PostgreSQL is moving to git! august/september-ish! #pgcon #
  • listening to koichi-san talk about snapshot cloning #pgcon #
  • now talking about a generalized data queue inside of Postgres http://tinyurl.com/2b8st6k #pgcon #
  • ideas being floated for exposing transaction commit order to client applications (make it lookup-able by LSN?) #pgcon #
  • and now we're talking about DDL triggers with Jan Wieck #ftw #pgcon #
  • a status report on modules (except we call them extensions now) from Dimitri Fontaine #pgcon #
  • looks like Jan is going to pursue DDL trigger-ish functionality through existing code hooks. #sweet #pgcon #
  • hearing about SQL/MED and plans to move forward – making dblink extensible, COPY FROM and planner support (tweak of relkind) #pgcon #
  • Postgres yearly developer meeting! http://tinyurl.com/2a7ps6q #pgcon #
  • mongodb: "running with scissors by default" -@Crad #pgcon #
  • New config options 4 hot standby: wal_level – controls what gets logged in the write ahead log; max_wal_senders – match #of standbys #pgcon #
  • New config opts 4 hot standby: max_standby_delay – how long 2 wait before killing conflicting queries on standby #pgcon #
  • New config opts 4 hot standby: wal_keep_segments – number of wal segments to preserve before recycling during streaming rep #
  • excited to hear that @ahockley is organizing a photowalk during @osbridge. #
  • OH: "I've poked the system and threatened it with a rewrite in Haskell." #
  • listening to Greg Smith go over what the heck datums are in pg core code #pgcon #
  • Listening in on Cedric's explanation of pgfincore: http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgfincore/ #
  • settling in to heckle @robertmhaas about the query planner #pgcon #
  • fun @enterprisedb party. great to meet karen, spend some time with @timbunce and generally make trouble. yay! #pgcon #
  • sitting in on #plparrot talk at #pgcon from @dukeleto and @davidfetter #
  • plparrot is driving the embedding interface/spec (parrot dev doc 10) #pgcon -@dukeleto #
  • Greg Smith *is* showing us a spreadsheet. #buffercache #stats #pgcon #
  • interesting project for #postgres research what different BM_MAX_USAGE_COUNT values might change buffer cache behavior #pgcon #
  • Have received photographic evidence of puppet theater at @pdxpug last night. #
  • Lightning talks from PgCon 2010 http://bit.ly/bekiyP #
  • Listening about Postgres-XC, taking notes here: http://etherpad.opensourcebridge.org/postgres-xc-koichi-suzuki-mason-sharp #pgcon #
  • Postgres-xc architecture http://flic.kr/p/83WDaU #
  • RT @dukeleto: PL/Perl is about 3x faster now (and actually safe!) that it does not use Safe.pm – @timbunce #pgcon #perl #
  • RT @Crad: Wow, complex.. more PostgreSQL-XC topology http://twitpic.com/1prynd #pgcon #
  • The last two chocolate chip cookies are being auctioned off for $21 to @timbunce #pgcon #
  • Seems like >$1200 was offered for a sweatshirt in honor of postgres 9.0 #pgcon #
  • In cash: $917, $300 from @crad, $300 from DeciBull, $1517 total for a sweatshirt. Cash going to the mission, remaining going to SPI #pgcon #
  • finally back to pack up after a wonderful #pgcon Thanks to @dlangille and all the Postgres hackers for another great conference. #