Here are some links to resources I’ve found for using PLV8 and the JSON datatype:

• Postgres core documentation for JSON
• Embracing the web with JSON and plv8
• node-postgres is the most popular module, older: Node.js adapter for Postgres — with Aurynn’s patches this is awesome.
• LISTEN/NOTIFY example
• Building a MongoDB clone in Postgres — Jerry is also working on a set of functions that convert PostGIS types to GeoJSON!
• What’s new in Postgres 9.3
• JSON and joins — it’s not beautiful, but it is possible. Someone also asked me about “subdocuments” in the style of MongoDB, with foreign keys. I don’t have a good answer, but am looking into it.
• Live updates to Meteor to Postgres
• Heroku supporting 9.3beta

And folks who took notes from my talk:

• James Longster’s notes
• Dave Stevens’ notes

I’m presenting a talk about JSON and PLV8 (available on speakerdeck or on dropbox) at the JSConf 5th year Family Reunion, in Amelia Island, FL today. My husband and I took a couple extra days vacation between the conference and the Memorial Day holiday to go birding. So, in the slide deck, I included pictures we took of several of the 40+ species we’ve seen.

The Great Florida Birding Trail starts on Amelia Island, and wow — there are so many amazing species, several of which are endangered, that we’ve seen in the short time we’ve been here. It’s hard to do justice to how beautiful the area is. There’s a wikipedia entry, and some strange politics that have preserved the natural areas nearby, like Cumberland Island.

Regardless, Amelia Island is a stunning backdrop for a conference. I’m a bit of a fish out of water here, but I’ve met so many people excited about the JSON datatype and what it means for their development environments. And, tons of people who wish I would have told them about this a year ago when Postgres 9.2 first started supporting it!

My talk is at 10:30am, right after my fellow Mozillian and creator of JavaScript Brendan Eich presents a talk about the future of browser VMs.

Wednesday May 23, with no fanfare, Tom Lane’s move to Salesforce.com was made public on the Postgres developer wiki.

For 15 years, Tom has contributed code to Postgres, an advanced open source relational database that started development around the same time as MySQL but has lagged behind it in adoption amongst web developers. Tom’s move is part of a significant pattern of investment by large corporations in the future of Postgres.

For the past few years, Postgres development has accelerated. Built with developer addons in mind, things like PLV8 and an extensible replication system have held the interest of companies like NTT and captured the imagination of Heroku.

Tom has acted as a tireless sentry for this community. His role for many years, in addition to hacking on the most important core bits, was to defend quality and a “policy of least surprise” when implementing new features.

Development for this community is done primarily on a mailing list. Tom responds to so many contributor discussions that he’s been the top overall poster on those mailing lists since 2000, with over 85k messages.

Really, he’s a cultural touchstone for a community of developers that loves beautiful, correct code.

Someone asked: “What does [Tom’s move] mean for Postgres?”

You probably don’t remember this:

Salesforce.com bases its entire cloud on Oracle database,” Ellison said, “but its database platform offering is PostgreSQL. I find that interesting.

When I read that last October, I was filled with glee, quickly followed by terror. I love my small database community, my friends and my job. What if Oracle shifted its attention to our community and attacked it, directly? So far, that hasn’t happened.

Instead, Salesforce advertised they were hiring “5 new engineers…and 40 to 50 more people next year” for a “huge PostgreSQL project.”

Tom’s move probably won’t change much for the day-to-day operation of Postgres itself. Hopefully, things are about to get real at Salesforce.

I’m a major contributor to Postgres. I started in 2006, learning about relational databases through work at a small bike parts manufacturer and ERP. My contributions include code, starting conferences, encouraging user group leaders and introducing Postgres to communities that otherwise would never hear from us. I’m a data architect at Mozilla.

The next post is about Postgres and 2-phase commit. And there are four additional posts in the series.

The whole series worth reading for anyone interested in data stores, consistency and Postgres!

So, here’s what I want to say today:

• Written by SQLAlchemy wiz Mike Bayer
• Here’s the tutorial. Socorro is now using alembic in production with SQLAlchemy 0.6.x. I’m hoping to get us upgraded to 0.8.x soon.
• Here’s what running an upgrade in production for Socorro looks like. Awesome right?
• Here’s what a migration looks like.
• Here’s a configuration file.
• Generating a migration from the command line might look something like:
  alembic revision -m "bug XXXXXX Add a new table" --autogenerate

The most difficult thing to deal with so far are the many User Defined Functions that we use in Socorro. This isn’t something that any migration tools I tested deal well with.

Happy to answer questions! And I’ll see about making a longer talk about this transition soon.

From the release announcement:

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released a security update to all current versions of the PostgreSQL database system, including versions 9.2.4, 9.1.9, 9.0.13, and 8.4.17. This update fixes a high-exposure security vulnerability in versions 9.0 and later. All users of the affected versions are strongly urged to apply the update immediately.

A major security issue fixed in this release, CVE-2013-1899, makes it possible for a connection request containing a database name that begins with “-” to be crafted that can damage or destroy files within a server’s data directory. Anyone with access to the port the PostgreSQL server listens on can initiate this request. This issue was discovered by Mitsumasa Kondo and Kyotaro Horiguchi of NTT Open Source Software Center.

I wanted to highlight a couple things from the FAQ we developed for this release.

1. There are no known exploits for the major security issue fixed by this release. The vulnerability was discovered through security testing conducted by NTT.
2. Only users of 9.0 PostgreSQL and higher are affected by the major vulnerability.
3. Affected users are those who allow unrestricted access to the network port PostgreSQL listens on. If you allow anyone, without IP address whitelisting, firewalling or some other kind of network-based access control, to connect to your network port, you are especially vulnerable.

Upgrading from minor version (9.2.3 to 9.2.4, for example) only requires that you install the new binaries and then restart PostgreSQL.

Additionally, if you are using GiST indexes, read the detailed notes in the release announcement to see if you are using features that require you to REINDEX your GiST indexes.

Please update as soon as possible!

Many thanks to our volunteer packagers who worked hard for the past several weeks to make this release possible. All PostgreSQL software releases are managed by volunteers.

Well, one of the hosts is now switching jobs to work full time on Ruby and Postgres. I’m so excited for all the new developers who are exploring Postgres, asking great questions and helping grow our web developer user base.

I’ve spent a lot time over the last few years troubleshooting people’s Postgres installs in the following, very common, situations:

• A developer installed Postgres on their Mac laptop >1 year ago
• Now they need to upgrade their Postgres to help me, or support a new application that needs new features
• They have an old database they’d like to migrate to the new version
• They have no idea which particular Mac OS X installer they used last time

For this exact situation, I have documented some features of the Mac OS X Installers for Postgres.

And, I felt so good to see this right after I posted the wiki page earlier today:

@zacduncan: “@selenamarie This is helpful to me at this very moment. Thank you. ”

\o/

If you think we should have more women contributing, talking about and using free and open source software, you should donate to the Ada Initiative today.

I spent this past summer working with Mary, Valerie and the many supporters and contributors to the Ada Initiative. I talked to past donors, and spent a lot of time writing and thinking about how the Ada Initiative has evolved.

I met hundreds of people in person and online who believe not only that the Ada Initiative is a crucial advocate for change in the world of open source, but that establishing gender balance in open source through their work is a worthwhile, achievable goal.

That work includes research, writing, training and creating culture and community specifically designed for women to flourish. They’ve created strong relationships across project, business and ideological boundaries, through their board, advisors and AdaCamps. I’m a member of the Advisors board, a major contributor to PostgreSQL and a data architect at Mozilla.

These relationships have formed into a strong, diverse and visible alliance of women in open technology. Because of the Ada Initiative’s work, I have seen an important shift from identifying problems to seeking solutions among my colleagues in open source. This work is made possible because TAI provides full-time employment to focus, write about and act on these solutions. Their work cannot continue without your support.

Between now and October 31, you can be the crucial donors who made this organization succeed in 2012. If you work for Microsoft, Google or Red Hat your donation with be doubled thanks to charitable giving matching programs. And individuals like Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson are sponsoring matching grants.

Social change is never easy, and the organizations like the Ada Initiative, who chose to step into the void, need our support.

Take a few minutes and give to the Ada Initiative, to Mary and Val, and help their work continue in 2013.

I’m going to be busy with a new job at Mozilla starting Monday, working on databases with the WebTools team.

Another small change is: I’m writing a few times a day to my tumblr and I’ve just stopped using twitter for the next few weeks. In the last day, I have really only thought about one or two things to share that would have been more than fleetingly useful. As I come across things, I’ll be sending them to the tumblr instead.

I’m also looking for patches and projects to work on for Postgres itself. During Thursday’s code sprint, I picked up an old patch for config directories, and today I spent some time re-generating a list of contributor names for the last 5 major versions of Postgres.

As usual, I feel so energized from hanging out with my favorite Postgres people. I’m only sad that I won’t see most of them in person again until next year.