Five days before Christmas I committed my patch to add incremental backup to PostgreSQL. Actually, I've been committing preparatory patches ...| rhaas.blogspot.com
Next month, I'll be hosting 2 or 3 discussions of David Rowley's talk, Writing fast C code for a modern CPU (and applying it to PostgreSQL), given at 2025.pgconf.dev (talk description here). If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. Thanks to David for agreeing to attend the sessions. As usual, nobody is too inexperienced to join us, and nobody is too experienced. We have everyone from total newcomers to interested...| Robert Haas
I started running PostgreSQL Hacking Workshops just about one year ago, and I've run one each month, except for May, when we had pgconf.dev. Signups are now open for August, if you're interested in joining us for a discussion of Peter Geoghan's talk on Multidimensional search strategies for composite B-Tree indexes, but I'd also like to take a few minutes to summarize where we are after one year of hacking workshops, both the good and the maybe not quite as good. So here goes.| Robert Haas
Next month, I'll be hosting 2 or 3 discussions of Tomas Vondra's talk, Fast-path locking improvements in PG18, given at 2025.pgconf.dev (talk description here). If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. Thanks to Tomas for agreeing to attend the sessions. We'll have plenty more 2025.pgconf.dev talks on the schedule in future months, as well! As usual, nobody is too inexperienced to join us, and nobody is too experi...| Robert Haas
Next month, I'll be hosting 2 or 3 discussions of Masahiko Sawada's talk, PostgreSQL meets ART - Using Adaptive Radix Tree to speed up vacuuming, from 2024.pgconf.dev. If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions.| Robert Haas
Here are a few mentoring-related updates.Read more »| Robert Haas
This month, I'm excited to tell you about the returning of the PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop along with a new Patch Review Workshop organized by Paul Jungwirth.Read more »| Robert Haas
People continue to tell me on a semi-regular basis how much they appreciate these approximately annual posts, the first of which came out in April of 2017. I think this might be more because the project doesn't have enough official ways to recognize people than it is an endorsement of the particular thing that I've done here, the limitations of which I am always careful to mention. In particular, I do not intend this as a comprehensive picture of contributions to the project, or even to devel...| Robert Haas
Please considering joining us next month (February 2025) for a discussion of Heikki Linnakangas's talk on The Wire Protocol, from PGCONF.EU 2024. For those not familiar with the concept, this hacking workshop is basically a virtual meetup: you watch the talk, and then you sign up to participate in one of two or three Zoom meetings where we discuss the talk. Usually, we're able to get the original author of the talk to join us; thanks to Heikki for agreeing to join us this month.| Robert Haas
The call for proposals for 2025.pgconf.dev has been extended to January 6, 2025, otherwise known as "very soon". I'm writing this post to encourage you to submit, if you haven't done so yet, regardless of whether you have submitted to 2024.pgconf.dev or its predecessor, PGCon, in the past. The event will only be as good as the content you (collectively) submit, and having found much value in these events over the years that I've been participating, I very much want our future events to be as ...| Robert Haas
Next month, I'l be hosting 2 or 3 discussions of Andres Freund's talk, NUMA vs PostgreSQL, given at PGConf.EU 2024. You can sign up using this form. I anticipate that both Andres and I will be present for the discussions, and I'd like to thank Andres and all of the other presenters who have made time to join the discussions and answer questions for their time (so far: Melanie Plageman, Thomas Munro, Andrey Borodin). It has been absolutely great having them join the workshops.| Robert Haas
Next month, I'll be hosting a discussion of Melanie Plageman's talk, Intro to Postgres Planner, given at PGCon 2019. You can sign up using this form. To be clear, the talk is not an introduction to how the planner works from a user perspective, but rather how to hack on it and try to make it better and perhaps get your improvements committed to PostgreSQL. If you're interested, please join us. I anticipate that both Melanie and I will be present for the discussions.| Robert Haas
I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago entitled Is pg_dump a Backup Tool?. In that post, I argued in the affirmative, but also said that it's probably shouldn't be your primary backup mechanism. For that, you probably shouldn't directly use anything that is included in PostgreSQL itself, but rather a well-maintained third-party backup tool such as barman or pgbackrest. But today, I want to talk a little more about why I believe that pg_dump is both amazingly useful for solving all kinds of...| Robert Haas
Next month, I'll be hosting a discussion of a talk by Andy Pavlo, given for his Intro to Database Systems course at CMU. The title of the talk is "Memory & Disk I/O Management and the video link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoewwZwVmv4. As usual, we have will have three sessions, and you can sign up to participate in one of them using this form.| Robert Haas
Recently, I've been hearing a lot of experienced PostgreSQL users reiterate this line: "pg_dump is not a backup tool." In fact, the documentation has recently been updated to avoid saying that it is a backup tool, to widespread relief. Experienced PostgreSQL users and developers have been publicly called out for having the temerity to assert that pg_dump is, in fact, a backup tool. I find this narrative deeply frustrating, for two reasons.Read more »| Robert Haas
This month, I'll be hosting a discussion of Thomas Munro's 2024.pgconf.dev talk, Streaming I/O and vectored I/O. As usual, there will be three sessions, and you can use this form to sign up for the session you prefer. However, if you do want to attend, please sign up right away, because our first session is scheduled for this Thursday.| Robert Haas
Our talk for September 2024 will is by Andrey Borodin on his Youtube Channel "Byte Relay." The talk is Walk-through of Implementing Simple Postgres Patch: From sources to CI. I picked this talk for two reasons: first, in the poll I ran in the PostgreSQL Hacker Mentoring Discord, it got almost as many votes as the talk we did this month on the query planner. Second, I wanted to have at least some content that was targeted toward newer developers.| Robert Haas
Sometimes, people post patches to pgsql-hackers and... nothing happens. No replies, no reviews, nothing. Other times, people post to patches to pgsql-hackers and a bunch of discussion ensues, but nothing gets committed. If you're the sort of person who likes to write patches for PostgreSQL, or if you're being paid to do so, you'd probably like to avoid having these things happen to you. In this blog post, I'm going to explain what I think you should do maximize the chances of a good outcome (...| Robert Haas
I'm pleased to be able to formally announce the PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop, as well as our first two topics, planned for August and September 2024. | Robert Haas
Here are a few updates on the mentoring program that I announced in a previous blog post.| Robert Haas
Yesterday, I announced a call for applications for a new mentoring program for PostgreSQL code contributors that I'm trying to start. I'm posting this on my blog as well for better visibility, and also to offer a few more comments and thoughts on this general topic of mentoring.| Robert Haas
I think 2024.pgconf.dev was a great event. I am really grateful to the organizing team for all the work that they did to put this event together, and I think they did a great job. I feel that it was really productive for me and for the PostgreSQL development community as a whole. Like most things in life, it was not perfect. But it was really good, and I'm looking forward to going back next year. It was also a blast to see Professor Margo Seltzer again; I worked for her as a research assista...| Robert Haas
Hacking on PostgreSQL is really hard. I think a lot of people would agree with this statement, not all for the same reasons. Some might point to the character of discourse on the mailing list, others to the shortage of patch reviewers, and others still to the difficulty of getting the attention of a committer, or of feeling like a hostage to some committer's whimsy. All of these are problems, but today I want to focus on the purely technical aspect of the problem: the extreme difficulty of wr...| Robert Haas
As in previous years, I've pulled together a few statistics on code contributions to PostgreSQL. See previous posts in this series for methodology and caveats. I calculate that, in 2023, there were 221 people who were the principal author of at least one PostgreSQL commit. 66% of the new lines of code were contributed by one of 18 people, and 90% of the new lines of code were contributed by one of 50 people. Here they are. Asterisks indicate non-committers.| Robert Haas
As of this writing, I know of three ways to make use of the incremental backup feature that I committed near the end of last month. I'll be interested to see how people deploy in practice. The first idea is to replace some of the full backups you're currently doing with incremental backups, saving backup time and network transfer. The second idea is to do just as many full backups as you do now, but add incremental backups between them, so that if you need to do PITR, you can use pg_combineba...| Robert Haas
VP, Chief Database Scientist @ EnterpriseDB, PostgreSQL Major Contributor and Committer| rhaas.blogspot.com
When my children were little and I was trying to figure out how to be a parent, I read someplace that you need to have five positive interac...| rhaas.blogspot.com
Here are a few updates on the mentoring program that I announced in a previous blog post . First, I ended up keeping applications open for 1...| rhaas.blogspot.com
Yesterday, I announced a call for applications for a new mentoring program for PostgreSQL code contributors that I'm trying to start. I'm p...| rhaas.blogspot.com
Hacking on PostgreSQL is really hard. I think a lot of people would agree with this statement, not all for the same reasons. Some might poin...| rhaas.blogspot.com