jim.mlodgenski's blog

For those of you in the New York area, PGDay NYC is only 1 week away, Monday April 2. We have a great mix of speakers ranging from members of the PostgreSQL core team to developers and DBAs based in the city. I'm especially excited to hear how some local companies like Spotify and Yodle are using PostgreSQL. If you haven't signed up yet, check out the details at:
http://pgday.nycpug.org/

Last week, we past a pretty cool milestone in the growth of NYCPUG with hitting 150 members of the Meetup group. Its been about a year since Mason Sharp took it upon himself to oraganize the city's PostgreSQL users and start holding regular meetings. At that time, there were only 30 members of the group and there wasn't a meeting for 6 months. Its been quite an amazing process having meetings month after month always seeing new faces and learning about others in the city using PostgreSQL.

One of the little tricks I've been using for years to load large amounts of data into PostgreSQL is to wrap the COPY command in a transaction with a TRUNCATE so that the load is not WAL logged.

CREATE TABLE foo (a int, b text, c timestamp);
...
BEGIN;
TRUNCATE foo;
COPY foo (a, b, c) FROM stdin;
...
COMMIT;

This has historically given me about a doubling of load speeds and when testing with 9.1alpha loading 2MM rows on my laptop, I'm seeing a 45% performance gain using this method.

Now that about a year has passed since Oracle's acquisition of Sun, we can take a look at Oracle's handling of the open source projects it inherited. Sun was a great evangelizer open source software and as such, sponsored many projects, but with Oracle being the great capitalists they are, are more focusing on the projects that could benefit their business. Projects like DarkStar and Drizzle have seen their funding dry up while others like GlassFish and OpenOffice appear to be key pieces of Oracle's overall strategy and look no worse for wear with the transition from Sun to Oracle.