django-pglocks 1.0.2 has been pushed out. This fixes a bug that Aymeric Augustin found that keep a lock from being properly released. He also contributed a test framework to it… many thanks to him for that!

I’ll be speaking at FOSDEM 2014 in Brussels! I’ll be giving two talks:

• “The Worst Day of Your Life” (on finding and recovering from PostgreSQL data corruption and bugs) on January 31st at the Raddison Blu hotel.
• “Real-Life PostgreSQL JSON” on February 1 in the PostgreSQL devroom at the main FOSDEM conference.

There’s a very unpleasant replication issue in version 9.0.14, 9.1.10, 9.2.5, 9.3.0 and 9.3.1 of PostgreSQL. Be sure to read the linked wiki entry carefully; it can result in silent data corruption on secondary servers in replication sets.

After all, isn’t that the most important issue?

Craig Kerstiens has a good overview of what the two types are. I wanted to give a quick and dirty flowchart as to which one I would use in a green-field development situation.

First, hstore performs better than JSON in nearly every situation, but performance is (as I wrote on

Advisory locks are a very useful feature in PostgreSQL, and they just aren’t used enough.

Here’s a scenario: You have a bulk import job. While that job is running, there’s an analysis job you want to prevent from starting, and you don’t want a bulk import to start while the analysis job is running. But any number of bulk

My presentation from FOSDEM 2013, PostgreSQL as a Schemaless Database, is now posted (sorry for the delay!).

I often find that I’m in the middle of a loop or something and discover an error. I want to exit the loop in a way that causes the database work I’ve done within it to be rolled back, but I don’t want that exception to propagate further.

This usually looks like:

1
try:
2
   with 

The Call for Papers for DjangoCon US 2013 is now open.

psycopg2, the Python PostgreSQL interface library, is now up to version 2.5. This includes built-in support for the JSON and range types… yay!

tl;dr: Don’t give tables the same name as base PostgreSQL types, even though it will let you.

It’s interesting how synchronicity can occur. In my talk about custom PostgreSQL types in Python, I mentioned that any time you create a table in PostgreSQL, you’re also creating a type: the row type of the table.

While