Robert Haas
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Robert Haas is Senior Database Architect at EnterpriseDB, PostgreSQL Major Contributor, and Committer. In this blog, Robert Haas shares information on PostgreSQL.
Robert Haas
2M ago
As in previous years, I've pulled together a few statistics on code contributions to PostgreSQL. See previous posts in this series for methodology and caveats. I calculate that, in 2023, there were 221 people who were the principal author of at least one PostgreSQL commit. 66% of the new lines of code were contributed by one of 18 people, and 90% of the new lines of code were contributed by one of 50 people. Here they are. Asterisks indicate non-committers.
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Robert Haas
3M ago
As of this writing, I know of three ways to make use of the incremental backup feature that I committed near the end of last month. I'll be interested to see how people deploy in practice. The first idea is to replace some of the full backups you're currently doing with incremental backups, saving backup time and network transfer. The second idea is to do just as many full backups as you do now, but add incremental backups between them, so that if you need to do PITR, you can use pg_combinebackup to reach the latest incremental backup before the point to which you want to recover, reducin ..read more
Robert Haas
4M ago
When my children were little and I was trying to figure out how to be a parent, I read someplace that you need to have five positive interactions with your child for each negative one to maintain a good relationship. I don't know whether that is fact or myth; a quick Google search suggests that the origin of the idea was in a study about how married couples argue, the idea being that in a good marriage, positive things continue to happen even amidst disagreement. It's wise to be wary about applying a number discovered in a very specific context more generally, but there's a compelling idea her ..read more
Robert Haas
11M ago
In my opinion, the PostgreSQL documentation is simultaneously excellent and fairly poor, and both its excellence and its shortcomings are direct results of the process by which the documentation is produced. The PostgreSQL documentation is stored in the same git repository as the source code, and anyone who patches the source code so as to change documented behavior must also patch the documentation to match.
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Robert Haas
11M ago
I'm sure you already know what I'm going to tell you: "Of course you need that backup_label file. How could you even think that you don't need that backup_label file?" Well, you're right. That is what I'm going to say. But do you know why you need that backup_label file? If you were to remove that backup_label file (or fail to create in the first place, in cases where that is your responsibility), what exactly is the bad thing that would happen to you?
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Robert Haas
1y ago
As in previous years, I've pulled together a few statistics on code contributions to PostgreSQL. See previous posts in this series for methodology and caveats. I calculate that, in 2022, there were 192 people who were the principle author of at least one PostgreSQL commit. 66% of the new lines of code were contributed by one of 14 people, and 90% of the new lines of code were contributed by one of 40 people. Here they are. Asterisks indicate non-committers.
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Robert Haas
1y ago
Rejoice and be glad! I was so pleased this morning to see that Melanie Plageman's patch to make autovacuum absorb new cost limit settings more quickly was committed by Daniel Gustafsson while I was busy enjoying a long Easter weekend. It's a minor change in the grand scheme of things, but there's a reasonably common situation where it's going to make life a lot easier.
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Robert Haas
1y ago
If an error message shows up in the PostgreSQL log, what program is malfunctioning? It's easy to conclude that the answer is PostgreSQL, but that's too simplistic.
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Robert Haas
1y ago
As I've written about before, a PostgreSQL superuser always has the ability to take over the operating system account in which PostgreSQL is running, but sometimes you'd like to have a role that can administer the database but not break out of it. In existing releases, there's no good way to accomplish that. You can either make a new role so weak that it can't perform ordinary administration tasks, or you can make it so strong that it can easily break into the operating system account and thus take over the superuser role as well. Unless you hack the source code, which some people have done, t ..read more
Robert Haas
1y ago
PostgreSQL 15 hasn't been released for very long, but some people have already been confused by the following error message:
pg_basebackup: error: could not initiate base backup: ERROR: could not set compression worker count to 4: Unsupported parameter
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