PostgreSQL

PGSQL Phriday 013 - Usecases and Why PostgreSQL

I'm the host of PGSQL Phriday blogging event for October 2023. I've always been much more into the practical side of engineering. Caring far more about what I can build with tools, rather than which tool I'm using. The challenge for Friday, October 6th 2023, publish a post on your blog telling a story about what you (or your team, client) built with PostgreSQL and how PostgreSQL helped you deliver. I'd love to read about the weird and varied things that people are using PostgreSQL for. If you think your usecase is boring, I'm sure it will be of use to someone. Plus you can always focus more on the story and how PostgreSQL helped to deliver a project, or could have, or didn't!

pgVis - Simple Visualisations For PostgreSQL

Close up photograph of a flower, where the stamens could almost be a bar chart

pgVis is a PostgreSQL extension for building simple visualisation dashboards with SQL. pgVis aims to make it easy to express data visualisations directly from SQL queries. Letting you quickly visualise some data for adhoc reports in psql or to build and share reporting dashboards in your organisation via pgvis-server. Either way, pgVis is designed to be PostgreSQL centric and to fit with your existing database workflows.

PostgreSQL - Not Just Relational

A Swiss Army Knife, which has so many uses

The extensibility of PostgreSQL is one of it's biggest advantages, making it capable of so many wide and varied usecases. Something that I've leveraged a lot on various projects, so much so that you probably don't need another database. Ryan mentions that it was extensions like PostGIS and hstore which brought him to PostgreSQL initially. For me it was TSearch2 (yeh, it was around 2008, it later got merged into core), then taking advantage of PostGIS, PL/Proxy, PGQ, JSONB and more over the years.

A PostgreSQL Backup Journey

Some broken hard drives, showing why you might need backups

I figured for PGSQL Phriday 002, that telling the story from when I looked after an energy insights database would be the most interesting way to talk about PostgreSQL backups. During the course of the project we used three differing backup tools and approaches, mainly driven by the ongoing exponential growth of the system. I also want to cover my biggest learning from that project. Which was something David Steele said at pgconf.eu: Make recovery part of your everyday processes.

HOT PostgreSQL

A design goal of my monitoring system, Bergamot Monitoring, was to ensure that the monitoring state was persisted. As a long time PostgreSQL user, PostgreSQL was the obvious choice and it hasn't been a bad decision. An interesting aspect of monitoring systems is that they are constantly busy. Even a small scale deployment is likely to be executing one check every second. This translates to around two database updates a second.