Blog
PostgreSQL - Not Just Relational
The extensibility of PostgreSQL is one of it's biggest advantages, making it capable of so many wide and varied usecases. Something that I've leveraged a lot on various projects, so much so that you probably don't need another database. Ryan mentions that it was extensions like PostGIS and hstore which brought him to PostgreSQL initially. For me it was TSearch2 (yeh, it was around 2008, it later got merged into core), then taking advantage of PostGIS, PL/Proxy, PGQ, JSONB and more over the years.
Read more...A PostgreSQL Backup Journey
I figured for PGSQL Phriday 002, that telling the story from when I looked after an energy insights database would be the most interesting way to talk about PostgreSQL backups. During the course of the project we used three differing backup tools and approaches, mainly driven by the ongoing exponential growth of the system. I also want to cover my biggest learning from that project. Which was something David Steele said at pgconf.eu: Make recovery part of your everyday processes.
Read more...Isokon Gallery
The Isokon Gallery is a small visitor centre for the Isokon building in north London. For anyone into modernist architecture it's well worth a visit, staffed by volunteers who are really pationate about the building, they made the experience very memorable.
Read more...Langham Dome
The Langham Dome is a unique little museum in the site of a former WW2 Anti-Aircraft gun training dome. The dome was state of the art in WW2 with an innovative projection mechanism, showing footage of planes and a mounted gun which projected a crosshair over the footage.
Read more...HOT PostgreSQL
A design goal of my monitoring system, Bergamot Monitoring, was to ensure that the monitoring state was persisted. As a long time PostgreSQL user, PostgreSQL was the obvious choice and it hasn't been a bad decision. An interesting aspect of monitoring systems is that they are constantly busy. Even a small scale deployment is likely to be executing one check every second. This translates to around two database updates a second.
Read more...Brew A Beer Day
Yesterday rather than the usual daily grind I went over to Sadler's Ales in Stourbridge for a Brew A Beer Day (it was a Christmas present). It turned out to be rather more hands-on than I expected and was immense fun. As someone who enjoys beer, it was fascinating to get involved with the process and to chat with a brewer.
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