Well, I’m not going; are you? This year’s Apple World-Wide Developer’s Conference was sold out by 8am Pacific Time, having gone on sale around 6am. (I missed the boat in 2011 and 2010, too.) I can’t imagine anyone except perhaps Apple thinks that the mad scramble to the keyboard that we’ve experienced in the last few years is a rational

First, read this essay about the disaster that is PHP. Every word is correct.

Then, view this photo set.

I’ll be speaking at the following conferences through July:

• PGCon, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, May 17-18.
• DjangoCon Europe, Zurich, Switzerland, June 4-6.
• Southwest LinuxFest, Charlotte, North Carolina, June 8-10.
• EuroPython, Florence, Italy, July 2-8.
• OSCON, Portland, Oregon, USA, July 16-20.

… or, inexcusable things I am tired of seeing in postgresql.conf files.

Do not mix ‘n’ match override styles.

There are two valid styles for overriding the default values in postgresql.conf: Putting your changes as a cluster at the end, or uncommenting the defaults and overriding in place. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Having some settings one way

Instagram has been in the news lately. In this really great post on Tumblr, Instagram talks about its technology stack.

I have some acquaintance with the Instagram people, and they are among the smartest technologists I’ve met. Really nice, too. (Of course, they mention this blog in the post, so I’m biased.)

As noted before, Django has a lot of facilities for handling transactions, and it’s not at all clear how to use them. In an attempt to cut through the confusion, here’s a recipe for handling transactions sensibly in Django applications on PostgreSQL.

The goals are:

• Database operations that do not modify the database aren’t wrapped in

My presentation from SCALE 10x, “PostgreSQL Performance When It’s Not Your Job” is now available for download.

I’d like to recommend an interesting post, “Sharding & IDs at Instagram”, about sharding using Postgres.

If you are not familiar with it already, Bucardo is a nifty multi-master replication system for PostgreSQL, written by Greg Sabino Mullane. Written in Perl, it is great if you need replication that doesn’t have the restrictions associated with PG 9’s streaming replication.

To keep your Bucardo installation clean and tidy, a few regular cron jobs are

My tutorial at OSCON 2011, Unbreaking Your Django Application, is now available for download.