This one was just so good I had to put it here - if you're already reading the pgsql-general list, just ignore this post. On a thread about stupid benchmarks (comparing databases with default settings without changing anything, comparing MyISAM with a transactional engine, etc), Tom Lane gave us this gem:
I think it's a fine analogy, precisely because they're both good in their respective problem domains. Try to carry 500 people from Los Angeles to Tokyo in an F-15. No? Try to win a dogfight in a 747. No? But they both fly, so it must be useful to compare them... especially on the basis of the most simplistic test case you can think of. For extra points, use only one test case. Perhaps this paper can be described as "comparing an F-15 to a 747 on the basis of required runway length".
That's a good one, Tom! And can we please have proper benchmarks instead of this kind. (I'm intentionaly not linking to the actual benchmark in question)
This is an indication of the first patch I've committed directly to the PostgreSQL source tree. Yes, that means I'm now a committer, something I find very exciting. It will give me a lot of opportunities to make brand new kinds of mistakes. Hopefully I will also be able to help take the load off the other committers as well.
To the guys who decided - thanks for the vote of confidence! I'll try not to mess up /mha/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=":-)" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /
Unfortunately, the security releases published monday had a pretty bad regression in them that broke a lot of scenarios, affecting 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2. New releases out today fixes this.
So. If you installed the security fix Monday, be sure to get the new version. If you didn't, be even more sure to get the new version so you get the security fix!
Most of the major distributions have updated their packages with the fixed fixes by now, but make sure yours does - you might need to wait a day or two in some cases.
Robert has committed the code to integrate the docbot (familiar to users in the #postgresql IRC channel) with the web search. Basically it does a very simple keyword matching against a limited set of keywords, and presents those hits before we show the full-text searches. Try it out for example by searching for lock.
Hopefully this will help out when people search for really ambigous things (like lock in the example) where a full text search can give too many and too unrelated results.
Thanks, Rob, now I didn't have to do that. But I'll steal your fame by blogging about it first.
Got this from Stefan:
(21:49:25) Stefan Kaltenbrunner: my niece (13 year old) just asked me what I'm doing right now
(21:49:56) Stefan Kaltenbrunner: I answered "well working for a project I'm part of" - look at www.postgresql.org for more information
(21:50:19) Stefan Kaltenbrunner: and she came back with "ok so this is a website about an elephant called fujitsu?"
I'm currently at the airport waiting for my flight home from SolutionsLinux (I really like how you an finally expect an airport to have proper wireless coverage in all seating areas in an airport, and not just a tiny wireless hotspot with 5 seats and 200 people. About time. It's not free yet, but hopefully that will also happen)
In summary, it was a really great show. Lots of interesting people to chat with, both from "the team" (meaning the postgresqlfr guys, Devrim, Greg and Heikki - group picture in Guillaumes blog), people in the other booths and the people who came to visit our booth. There were a lot of interesting situations people brought up that they needed help with. Everything from configuring tsearch2 for special-case usage in french (I learned a little more about the French language, but mostly that I really don't know enough about the language to help with that. And I could learn a few more things about tsearch2 as well there) to tuning postgresql and stored procs for loading large amounts of data (no, it's not acceptable that it takes 2-3 months to load six million rows of master data and related subdata, even if you do a whole lot of checks on it). Hopefully we could be of help to some of these people, and managed to refer the rest of them to the proper place to ask more.
I would also like to add that I think the business/non-profit mix in the PostgreSQL booth worked really well. I've heard some people who have concerns about PostgreSQL company representatives (in this case, Dalibo, CommandPrompt and EnterpriseDB) manning a non-profit booth. But really, I see no problem. They are all in "community first" mode. Sure, they get to hand out their little flyers and business cards (of course they do!), but the primary work is to help the users as a part of the community. I can see how people can feel it could be a problem in theory, but if you work with the right people (which I have the feeling that we generaly do in the PostgreSQL community, given the representatives I've met from the pg companies - both now and earlier) it's just not going to be a problem in reality. (But Greg, pouring coffee over the competition may not be an acceptable thing. Try not to make a habit out of it)
So to sign off from that, a big thanks to the french people at postgresqlfr for inviting me and making me feel really welcome here, to Dalibo for taking care of the travel costs, to Devrim for a nice couple of days hanging out, and to all the people I met here for having a great time! I will definitely do this again next year if given the chance /mha/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=":-)" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /
Oh, and some free marketing for these guys for providing free wireless internet so we could communicate with the world, since our hotel didn't have one (hello, Gavin).
Third and final day of SolutionsLinux 2007 today. There's interesting people all over to meet yet again - and no, we haven't exhausted the supply yet.
As planned, Greg Heikki from EDB showed up - they actually managed to get here before me and Devrim, even though we weren't that late. Nice to meet Greg again, and I've never med Heikki before. But they're both good pg hackers, and when you meet such people, interesting discussions are always going to happen.
Had a nice chat with a guy from Ingres, and also with some of the guys from fon. Jean-Paul led the track of OSS databases in the "commercial talks" before lunch. I'm told there was a very good talk on migration to PostgreSQL, but I didn't even bother pretending to go there since it was all in French.
And I got to do the good deed of the day fairly early - taught the salesguy from Continuent that there is no such thing as Postgre. There are many options for how to say it, but that's not one of them. And since he's selling a product based on it, he should know. Which he now does...
(Oh, Devrim - when will you fix the date problem on planet?)
So it looks like we'll have even more international PostgreSQL people showing up for SolutionsLinux tomorrow - Greg Stark and Heikki Linnakangas of EnterpriseDB UK should be showing up in the morning and hang out for a day. Not sure how long they'll be around in the evening, but it'll be nice getting a chance to meet them again.
And yes, we're back at the beer-bar with free WiFi - it helps when you don't have any in the hotel. The PostgreSQLFR guys just had their yearly meeting to approve next years plans and things like that. Unfortunately it was all in French, so I can't really comment on the contents.
And yes, this is very blog-intensive times. But I blame it all on Devrim, and maybe a little on the great elephant-cookies served in our booth.
Oh yeah, and Gavin - thanks, man. I'm sure you know what I mean. If not, you will soon enough...
So the talk is over since a couple of hours. I survived. Wasn't all that many people there, and they appeared to deal fairly well with the fact that I didn't speak French. Nowhere near as many as the Mozilla guy had later, but hey, everybody needs a browser and not everybody needs a proper database.
Had some big issues with the microphone/speaker system (thanks Devrim for fixing some of them), and given that I was entirely unprepared (last night I looked at my slides for 5 minutes, before that it was almost a year since I saw it) I'm pretty happy with how it went off.
Jean-Paul had a talk at the Mandriva booth, which was probably a lot harder - he had people walking around in the booth doing other things the whole time. OTOH, he got a proper working microphone, so he shouldn't be complaining /mha/templates/default/img/emoticons/wink.png alt=";-)" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /
Oh, and they ran out of water (!) in the speakers/exhibitors bar. Not very good before you have to do a talk, but it worked out. Being French, I guess they stocked up on wine and champagne instead (yes, they did. Not really used to that...) Oh yeah, and they ran out of glasses too, but they still had espresso-cups...
So I'm at SolutionsLinux in Paris with Devrim and Jean-Paul and the other guys from PostgreSQLFR. Turns out that Jean-Paul had scheduled me for a talk. We had talked about it loosely, but I didn't really realize it was actually going to happen. Seems it is.
So if you're here, there's going to be a pg talk at 11:30 tomorrow (wednesday). AFAIK there is only one room for talks in them, and it's right next to the postgresqlfr booth. I'm going to do a repeat of my "The PostgreSQL Advantage" talk from last years linuxforum, since I really haven't prepared anything. Hopefully it'll work even without preparation, otherwise I'll just blame the language barrier...
And if you're around and not interested in the talk, just pop over to the postgresqlfr booth (we're at E44) and have a chat. And try the little elephant-cakes, they're great!
As for the show itself, there are a lot of people here. Very interesting. As often, much more people in the non-profit area than around the companies. Of the open source databases, mysql and ingres are both represented here (by their respective companies, not by community people from what I can tell), but no sign of firebird.
Network connection is pretty crap (only wired, very slow, and only http+ssh (we negotiated ourselves to get https as well), no vpn, no imap and such things). But then we're not here to surf the net either, we're here to talk to people about PostgreSQL.