PostgreSQL

Things I've learned and thoughts about PostgreSQL database.

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.