Whoops, looks like it's been the better part of three years since I last made a post on this blog. Life, etcetera, has got in the way for a while, and in the intervening period I've undergone some changes to my personal life and also moved countries - to Japan, where I've long wanted to live and work and which has a thriving PostgreSQL culture.
Luckily I was able to step into a job involving running PostgreSQL as the core of a multi-million dollar business, and while it's not always been plain sailing, PostgreSQL (even the clapped-out 7.4 version running a legacy app) has proved by far and away the most reliable part of the operation and I'm looking forward to implementing the replication features available in 9.0.
Meanwhile this blog, and several other sites on the same server, are now of course on 9.0 (and the supporting application has even played an ever so minor role finding a bug in a 9.0 beta). Once again, my thanks to everyone who puts in much more effort than myself for making PostgreSQL such a great product!
One of the major features in the upcoming 8.3 release is the integration of
the tsearch2 full text search extension as a
core PostgreSQL feature.
While there are no fundamental changes, there are some differences which make upgrading from an
existing installation a little tricky. The following are my notes from upgrading a test version of the database
which powers this website.
(I'm back in the wonderful world of SQL in general and PostgreSQL in particular after a long hiatus).
Just came across this article describing (briefly) someone's practical experience converting a website backend from MySQL to PostgreSQL, with PostgreSQL coming out faster. Not an exhaustive scientific test, but the comments are interesting reading.
It's not often that you click through from {insert name of popular Web 2.0 community site here} to {insert name of Web 2.0 startup-type site here} and notice they're running the site on a decently pachydermal database engine, but this one called TrenchMice certainly is.