DBA day 2022 and other silly stuff

DBA day 2022 and other silly stuff

Again there is another pretty long hiatus.

Thing happens and independently from how bad my childhood was, family comes first.

Anyway after a rollercoaster ride that started in July 2021 things are getting more stable.

FOSDEM PostgreSQL devroom video

FOSDEM PostgreSQL devroom video

For obvious reason the FOSDEM this year is an online event. The staff is building from scratch an infrastructure in order to deliver the speaker’s videos in a virtual environment.

The catch is that all the talks must be pre recorded and uploaded via pentabarf, the software historically used by FOSDEM to manage the talk submissions.

What follows is my experience in recording,uploading and submitting the video for my upcoming talk.

The strange case of the EXCEPTION block

The strange case of the EXCEPTION block

When in a pl/pgsql function there is an exception then the function stops the execution and returns an error. When this happens all the changes made are rolled back.

It’s always possible to manage the error at application level, however there are some cases where managing the exception inside the function it may be a sensible choice. And pl/pgsql have a nice way to do that. The EXCEPTION block.

However handling the exception inside a function is not just a cosmetic thing. The way the excepion is handled have implications that may cause issues.

Regenerated

Regenerated

With PostgreSQL 12 the generated columns are now supported natively. Until the version Postgresql 11 it were possible to have generated columns using a trigger.

In this post we’ll see how to configure a generated column via trigger and natively then we’ll compare the performances of both strategies.

Time and relative dimension in space

Time and relative dimension in space

The transactional model has been in PostgreSQL since the early versions. In PostgreSQL its implementation follows the guidelines of the SQL standard with some notable exceptions.

When designing an application it’s important to understand how the concurrent access to data happens in order to avoid unexpected results or even errors.