April 19, 2012 | 28 Comments
Whenever people talk about ack, there’s always a discussion of whether ack is faster than grep, and how much faster, and people provide data points that show “I searched this tree with find+grep in 8.3 seconds, and it took ack … Continue reading
April 18, 2012 | 70 Comments
As programmers, assigning names makes up a big part of our jobs. Phil Karlton said “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” It’s a hard problem, and it’s something we deal with every … Continue reading
February 16, 2012 | 0 comments
At work, I have a big 14M-row production table with a bunch of indexes on it. One of the indexes was bloated, so I built a new version of the index, and dropped the old bloated index. Got back a … Continue reading
January 26, 2012 | 1 Comment
In the world of devops, we have complex software packages like Jenkins to take care of continuous integration of source, and intricate monitoring systems like Nagios and Icinga to keep an eye on the state of your servers. For notification … Continue reading
October 16, 2011 | 0 comments
Tired of hearing that “Steve Jobs was just a marketer, Dennis Ritchie was a real programmer.” Both men were necessary to our industry’s growth. It’s not a competition. The difference in media coverage of each was more about the visibility … Continue reading
October 13, 2011 | 1 Comment
Dennis Ritchie, pioneer of programming, creator of the C programming language and one of the creators of UNIX, has died. Tim Bray said it best: “It is impossible — absolutely impossible — to overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis Ritchie. I’ve been … Continue reading
October 10, 2011 | 0 comments
Ever since we got the fast new database server with SSDs, I’ve been monitoring which tables are getting heavy traffic and should go live on the SSDs. We have two tablespaces, “fast” which is faster but smaller, and “slow” which … Continue reading
September 23, 2011 | 0 comments
Look for and act on the surprises around you ever day. That’s where we have the most opportunity to make changes for the better. Yesterday, amidst all the discussion of CERN’s announcement that it seemed to have measured neutrinos moving faster … Continue reading
September 22, 2011 | 1 Comment
Like I posted my Notes and comments from OSCON 2011, here are my notes and comments from Postgres Open 2011. Some of it is narrative, and some of it is just barely-formatted notes. The target here is my own use … Continue reading
September 21, 2011 | 0 comments
I’m upgrading two work databases from PostgreSQL 9.0 to 9.1, and that means some test bulk loads. (Yes, I know about pg_upgrade, but we’re doing reloads for other reasons.) Greg Smith’s fantastic PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance is a great help … Continue reading