Update 2012/06/05: So of course after I go publishing this blog post, I discover a major shortcoming in 0.3.0. It requires super-user privileges to actually run. Teach me to test with only my own account in the database. I’ll be pushing 0.3.1 out shortly with a fix to allow non-superusers to be able to use these logging functions. Just requires a little bit of configuration, which I’ve added to that section below and the README.

Up until fairly recently, upgrades for PostgreSQL databases have been looked upon with a sort of dread. Especially for those of us maintaining very large databases. The thought pattern usually went that it was easier to deal with running an older system than trying to schedule extended periods of downtime to allow for the full dump and restore of the entire database. Or trying to use third party tools like Bucardo to replicate the database to another system with a newer version to keep things up and running as long as possible for the upgrade.

So most DBAs would tell you the best way to handle Daylight Saving Time in the database is to run your server in UTC time and just avoid the complications all together. That is definitely ideal! But not everyone follows that advice and if a system has been running in a timezone with DST for a long time, changing to UTC can be a huge hassle. One big issue that can crop up due to DST is with systems that do time-based replication from one database to another via specialized jobs (not streaming replication or the built in master/slave stuff).

As promised in my previous post on the PostgreSQL Oracle FDW, I’ve done some performance testing verses our old method of using DBI-Link to replicate tables from an Oracle 8i instance to postgres 9.1.2. I’ve got good news on several fronts! First being that there is a definite improvement on the replication speed. Here’s some stats on our old process that copied an entire table of about 1.5 million rows

So one of our clients is still stuck running an old Oracle 8i database. Please, no comments on how there’s no more support and they should have moved off this long ago. We know. They know. Moving on… The introduction of a new Oracle Foreign Data Wrapper peaked our interest. Could it possibly still work with 8i? Working with our SA team, they found that the oldest client libraries still available from Oracle are 10.

No, I’m not a Minecraft player. I got into it for a little while during the Alpha, paid for the full client to support Mojang just because I thought the idea was fantastic and loved seeing what other people do. But I just couldn’t stick with it. I do, however, have several friends that are fanatical fans of the game and some cycles on the home server to spare. So I offered to host a server for them so they could all play together instead of their own single player clients at home.