The slides for my presentation, “PostgreSQL, Python and Squid” (otherwise known as, “using Python in PostgreSQL and PostgreSQL from Python”) presented at PyPgDay 2013 at PyCon 2013, are available for download.

tl;dr: Each and every tablespace is critical to the operation of your PostgreSQL database. If you lose one, you’ve lost the entire database.

This one can be short and sweet: If you use tablespaces in PostgreSQL, each and every one of them is a critical part of your database. If you lose one, your database is corrupted,

A client of ours recently had me log into their server to set up a tablespace scheme for them. While I was in, I noticed that the secondary of the streaming replication pair wasn’t connecting to the primary. A quick check showed that the primary had been moved from one internal IP address to another, and in doing so everything

I presented “PostgreSQL When It’s Not Your Job” at DjangoCon US 2012, and you can get the slides here.

Amazon has introduced a couple of new I/O-related offerings in AWS, both aimed at addressing the notoriously poor I/O performance of EBS.

The first is the EC2 High I/O Quadruple Extra Large Instance. This is a standard Quad XL instance with two 1TB SSD-backed volumes directly attached to the instance. Although Amazon does not quote I/O performance on

For years, the standard log analysis tool for PostgreSQL has been pgfouine (For those wondering, a “fouine” in French is a beech marten; as the saying goes, I am none the wiser, if somewhat better informed.) However, pgfouine seems to have stalled as a project; there haven’t been updates in a while, it requires a patch to work with

My presentation PostgreSQL When It’s Not Your Job from DjangoCon Europe 2012 is now available here.

When you are in a business that is engaging in constant warfare with the people who your product is nominally targeted at, you are in a bad business.

My presentation from PGCon 2012, PostgreSQL on AWS with Reduced Tears, is now up.

Pickup trucks are great.

No, really. They are great vehicles. You can use them for all sorts of really useful things: Bringing your tools out to a construction gig. Delivering refrigerators. Helping your friend move a sofa. Carting away a reasonable amount of construction debris.

But if you need to deliver 75,000 pounds of steel beams to a