It’s funny that there really isn’t a lot of chatter about data warehousing within the PostgreSQL community, and yet here is [http://www.it-director.com/article.php?articleid=13216 another company using PostgreSQL] as the basis for a black box data warehouse appliance. ParACCEL is the name, and apparently they some hacks centered around in-memory processing to build there application. Much like Netezza, they are apparently not open source friendly, so there has as of yet been no effort to contribute anything back to the community. This of course means that Greenplum, by way of [http://www.bizgres.org Bizgres], is still the community favorite in the data warehouse market, but it is always interesting to see more people climb aboard the PostgreSQL bandwagon, and who knows, maybe as thier profile grows they will get a little more involved in the community process. (In case anyone from ParACCEL is reading this, sponsored developers, patch contributions, funding, and advocacy development are all nice ways to give back.)

Got bit by a bug in our application today. The code in question inserts into the site table, calls lastval(), then takes that value and inserts into host, calls lastval() again, then inserts into application table. (We’re building relationship trees). The problem? We added a new trigger to the site table, to have it do an insert into another table to handle some advanced messaging. Unfortunatly this table had a sequence on it…
What ended up happening was we were adding sites fine for a couple hours, but messaging was broken. By the time we tracked that down, we got messaging working (almost) but then site insertion started tossing errors. Fooy! We chase a number of red herrings but finally realized that our lastval() calls were generating imroper sequence numbers! So we are now replacing all calls to lastval() with a curval() and the appropriate sequence name.
Anyone else been bitten by that? I actually told my app developers we could run into this problem in the future when we first decided to use lastval(), but we wanted to use some new 8.1 goodness and also thought this was a good way to hide the sequence machinations from our timid junior app developer, plus I didn’t figure it would happen so quick… we never even made it through one release cycle! So, I am hereby declaring lastval() as evil, or at least a problem waiting to happen… beware the lastval()!!
:-)

Coinciding with thier [http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Vs4UWA930OGgPZ/Novell-Hopes-Open-Enterprise-Platform-Will-Convert-Customers.xhtml recent partnership announcement], Bill Mason, Vice President of Business Development (and former Novell employee) at EnterpriseDB, was recently interviewed on [http://www.novell.com/company/podcasts/openaudio.html Novell’s Open Audio Podcast]. Bill gives a quick overview of what EnterpriseDB is, how it differs from PostgreSQL, and what types of customers it has been aiming for. It wieghs in at just under three minutes, so even the most hectic of schedules should be able to cram it in, so [http://www.novell.com/recording/novellopenaudio/noa_bs06-partnerspotlight05.mp3 go give it a listen].

Man, saw a post for Cymer come through yesterday. Unfortunatly it is for a C/C++, which I am not, but if you are, I’d certainly recommend applying. [http://cymer.com/ Cymer] does some wicked things with pushing large amounts of data around, they have the resources to give you good equipment to work with, and the couple of folks I have met all seem like smart guys; certainly if you had a chance to work with [http://joeconway.com/ Joe Conway] you would want to. OK, enough of that… Incidentally if you want to move to North Central Florida and you are an expert in .Net Web Development ([http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page mono] skills a plus) drop me a line, I know someone who is hiring.

Following up on our [http://people.planetpostgresql.org/xzilla/index.php?/archives/162-Jason-and-I-interviewed-by-SearchOpenSource.com.html previous interview], we answer [http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid39_gci1176006,00.html a few more questions] for the SearchOpenSource.com folks. This time we delve a little more into how PostgreSQL compares to commercial database systems, SQL standards compliance, and some situations where you might work with other database systems. Hope you enjoy it.

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that the deadline for proposals for the PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit is less than 5 days away. If you are interested in submitting a proposal, check out the [http://conference.postgresql.org/ conference registration site]. Also I wanted to say that, if you are feeling intimidated about submitting because you are just Joe User, please don’t be. Some of the most popular talks among the PostgreSQL developers have been case studies that show off how PostgreSQL has played a critical role in your business. [http://techdocs.postgresql.org/oscon2005/aaron.thul/pg_built_your_car.pdf Aaron Thule’s talk from OSCON 2005] comes to mind here. And on a final note, I’d like to make a request for a few specific talks I have heard about but not seen, including the following ideas from [http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2332 Jonah Harris]; Debugging PL/pgSQL, Writing Lightning-Fast Stored Procedures in PL/pgSQL, Building an Open Source Software Business, Building an Open Source Consulting Business. I’d also like to see [http://www.slony2.org/slony2_opendbcon.pdf Gavin’s talk on Slony II]. Anyone else have some specific talks they want to see? Hmm… thinking about that, one final final note; if you want to see one of my talks please drop me a line. I’ll be involved in the PostgreSQL Web Developers Discussion/Sessions or whatever that turns out to be, but I’ve no specific plans to outside of that.

Jason and I were [http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid39_gci1174224,00.html?bucket=ETA recently interviewed] by the folks at SearchOpenSource .com. The interview was set up in conjunction with [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=as2&path=ASIN/1590595475&tag=zillablog-20&camp=1789&creative=9325 the PHP/PostgreSQL book] release, though it ended up being more about spreading the gospel that is PostgreSQL. Actually the introduction ended up being a little aggressive; I mean, I tend to think that PostgreSQL is better than SQL Server, and have heard of some specific examples of [http://people.planetpostgresql.org/mha/index.php?/archives/74-Wow-for-contribintarray.html where it shines], but we weren’t trying to start any trouble, we just like talking about PostgreSQL. [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=”:-)” style=”display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;” class=”emoticon” /]]

In some recent chatter with the EnterpriseDB folk, they have indicated that there would soon be some significant customer announcements coming out, and today looks like the first wave. In an article on webwereld.com, [http://www.webwereld.nl/articles/40315 EnterpriseDB announces a customer agreement and corporate partnership between itself and Sony Online Entertainment Inc.]. The Sony folks don’t go into a lot of specifics, but do say they plan to save “a substantial amount of money”, and also that they investigated using mysql, but sited EnterpriseDB’s Oracle compatability as a key factor in thier final decision. Congrats to Andy and the rest of the crew at EnterpriseDB, it is certainly a big step for them.

My [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=as2&path=ASIN/1590595475&tag=zillablog-20&camp=1789&creative=9325 co-author] [http://blogs.apress.com/?author=17 Jason Gilmore]’s article about [http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid39_gci1172668,00.html?bucket=NEWS common misconceptions people have about PostgreSQL] has really [http://www.digg.com/software/Five_reasons_why_you_should_never_use_PostgreSQL_–_ever touched a nerve]. I haven’t seen a flamewar like this in some time. The funny thing is that Jason is no PostgreSQL zealot; he likes it well enough, but also likes mysql plenty enough, having authored numerous articles about it as well, and I would generally consider him pretty database agnostic. My favorite quote so far was this one on digg: There were a number of other interesting things mentioned, a little much to go into them now, but some would include the number of people complaining about the name “PostgreSQL”, people complaining that there is no autoconfiguration tool, and people complaining that they don’t want to give time to a bsd project because companies will steal thier code. All things to think about, all possible future topics for the blog… but for now, I’m off to [http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/14/2112210 read more flames]. [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=”:-)” style=”display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;” class=”emoticon” /]]

I was talking to a follow programmer at work yesterday when the topic of the [http://abc.go.com/primetime/lost/index.html TV show “Lost”] came up. He asked if I had seen the first season, and I told him that I actually [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=as2&path=ASIN/B00005JNOG&tag=zillablog-20&camp=1789&creative=9325 own it on DVD]. He was somewhat impressed by this, since he also owned it, but I could see that a disclaimer was called for. Namely that I don’t spend time crusing the [http://www.losttv-forum.com/forum/ message boards] cooking up [http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2004-11-16-lost-mysteries_x.htm Lost conspiracy theories] are anything… I’m more of a casual watcher. However I did have to admit that I do listen to the [http://abc.go.com/primetime/lost/podcasts/104146.html Lost podcast], so I guess that made me a bit more than a casual fan. To this he took interest; Akk! I’ve never had that conversation before. Normally when I mention podcasts, I am met with a blank stare, but here was a person who had heard of them but apparently only in the post iTunes world. I went on to explain that I wasn’t sure if it was on itunes, and that I just used a simple shell script (actually [http://linc.homeunix.org:8080/scripts/bashpodder/ bashpodder]) to grab the podcast feed and download the shows that way, so I could play them on my “[http://www.xmms.org/ winamp]” mp3 player on computer. Luckily this guy was technical, so this didn’t throw him too much. The funny thing was that if you’ve been into podcasting for awhile, you’ll have heard the talk that it should really be renamed because it makes people think you need to have an ipod to get into it, which is completly untrue. The funny thing is that when I got into podcasting, it was like a month or so before I ever made any connection with podcasts and ipods. I first got into podcasts looking for online streaming radio stations. They are pretty hard to find, especially where I work, cause they block a number of ports that are common for that type of software. What I ended up stumbling across was the [http://daveramsey.com/etc/cms/index.cfm?intContentID=3236 Dave Ramsey show podcast], which was a podcast based on a radio show that I had heard a few times on the radio. So I went about setting up a podcatcher and downloading feeds and the rest was history… except for that name. My take was that it was called podcasting because it was broadcasting to pod farms all over the country. I didn’t have an ipod, so that just made a lot more sense. Even more so, a lot of these shows are well over thirty minutes and even an hour in length… who is really going to listen to that on a mobile mp3 player. I mean who has commutes that long? Anyway that was my thinking, podcasting is broadcasting for podfarms. forget the ipod, you don’t need it. You just need a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcatcher podcatcher] and an mp3 player on your computer and your in. Got it?