I go to a lot of conferences. If you ask my co-workers, I probably go to too many conferences. Going to a lot of conferences, I get a chance to see a lot of keynotes, closing keynotes, and plenary discussions. Different conferences have different keynotes, but the one thing that sticks out in my head is that the keynotes and opening talks at a conference set the mood for the entire event.
Why would anyone want to use PostgreSQL instead of SQL Server? There are a lot of factors to consider when choosing how to store your data. Sometimes we need to look deeper than the standard choice and consider something new. If you’re starting a brand new project, where should you store your data? Here are ten reasons why you might want to consider PostgreSQL over SQL Server.
Releases Every Year Let’s face it, waiting three to five years for new functionality to roll out in any product is painful.
I’ve been working on implementing some infrastructure code for a client. We’re building robust partition swapping to make it easy to load data without disrupting user queries. We’re doing everything eles the right way, but partition swapping makes it really easy to correct a bad load of a past data. The upside is that this code is really easy to write. There are enough examples, samples, and previous samples out there that a lot of the basics can be easily implemented.
If you’re like me, you probably don’t think a lot about what you throw into the trash on your computer – you just put files and folders in there to be deleted and, eventually, you empty the trash. The other day I dropped a 40GB virtual machine into the trash and then told OS X to empty the trash. A few hours later, it was still chugging away at pretending it was deleting the trash.
I spent the weekend at Stir Trek: Thor Edition in Columbus, OH. While I had a blast speaking about databases, I had even more fun attending and learning.
Programming the Cloud with HTTP/REST I knew about REST before I attended this talk and I’ve done a bit of REST programming (right before I decided to nerd out on data), but Mike Amundsen did a great job of convincing me why I should care about REST as a programming paradigm for web developers.
Every November, a bunch of database geeks gather for the Professional Association for SQL Server’s (PASS) international Summit. This year it’s going to be held October 11-24 in Seattle, Washington. I didn’t submit last year since I was involved with the abstract selection process. This year I’m not involved, so I decided to submit a few abstracts.
Rewrite Your T-SQL for Great Good! Refactoring SQL is not like refactoring application code.
Astute readers and internet stalkers will have noticed that I left my job at Quest Software back in March. I wasn’t unhappy, I just had the opportunity to take my show on the road and go solo. I’ve had the idea of being my own boss in the back of my head for along time. Suddenly I was confronted with a situation where a former pipe dream was all too real.
I recently covered the internals of a row in PostgreSQL, but that was just the storage piece. I got more curious and decided that I would look into what happens when a row gets updated. There are a lot of complexities to data, after all, and it’s nice to know how our database is going to be affected by updates.
Getting Set Up I started by using the customer table from the pagila sample database.
This past weekend I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at the firstSQLPeople event in Richmond, Virginia.
The Back Story Back in February, Andy Leonard asked me to speak at a new event. The idea behind his new event was inspiration. Instead of focusing on educating others, Andy asked us to share our own inspiration. Instead of presenting a seminar or training course, the idea was to talk about my work, my vision, and my passion for database technology (to steal Andy’s own words).
We’ve already talked about The Promise and Failure of Federated Databases and Why Don’t We Have Federated Databases. At the end of the second post I concluded that the only real way to solve this problem is to build the federated database ourselves. Before you ask, “Does he really want us to roll our own database” take a deep breath and relax; nobody is going to be writing a database.