Here are a few updates on the mentoring program that I announced in a previous blog post. First, I ended up keeping applications open for 12 days. During that time, I got 34 applications. Many of the 9 committer-mentors who initially offered to mentor one person ended up deciding that they would be willing to mentor two people, so I was able to send out 14 acceptances, which I think is a great result, especially considering that this is the first time we've done something like this. Read more ..read more

Yesterday, I announced a call for applications for a new mentoring program for PostgreSQL code contributors that I'm trying to start. I'm posting this on my blog as well for better visibility, and also to offer a few more comments and thoughts on this general topic of mentoring. Read more ..read more

I think 2024.pgconf.dev was a great event. I am really grateful to the organizing team for all the work that they did to put this event together, and I think they did a great job. I feel that it was really productive for me and for the PostgreSQL development community as a whole. Like most things in life, it was not perfect. But it was really good, and I'm looking forward to going back next year. It was also a blast to see Professor Margo Seltzer again; I worked for her as a research assistant many years ago. She gave a wonderful keynote. Read more ..read more

Hacking on PostgreSQL is really hard. I think a lot of people would agree with this statement, not all for the same reasons. Some might point to the character of discourse on the mailing list, others to the shortage of patch reviewers, and others still to the difficulty of getting the attention of a committer, or of feeling like a hostage to some committer's whimsy. All of these are problems, but today I want to focus on the purely technical aspect of the problem: the extreme difficulty of writing reasonably correct patches. Read more ..read more

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.  #  |              author              | lines | pct_ ..read more

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

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

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. Read more ..read more

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? Read more ..read more

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. Read more ..read more