Some projects I'm involved in
And now to some interresting things, at least for some of the audience. Or so I hope...
Contents
PostgreSQL related software
This section covers software complementary to PostgreSQL that I'm participating into.
pg_staging
pg_staging aims to allow you to control a lot of dev and pre-live and
snapshot databases, restored straight from your production backups, in an
easy way. Either interactively with the console or in scripts to be run from
cron.
pgloader
The PostgreSQL parallel ETL, writen in python. This little piece of software
is a layer atop the PostgreSQL COPY command. The difference between pgloader
and plain COPY is the behavior in case of errors in the source data files
and the range of input formats supported.
And this little fact that pgloader is able to parallelize its tasks, loading
several file at once or even using more than one CPU to load a single source
file.
SkyTools: Londiste & PGQ for PostgreSQL replication
The SkyTools project is a suite of tools allowing to easily (I mean, in a really easy way) implement a replication solution, and I'm keeping a SkyTools page here.
You'll have to run two daemons for the replication to be operational, first
a PGQ maintenance one (pgqadm.py), which role is to manage the provider
queue. Then the replication daemon itself, londiste.py, which is a PGQ
consumer implementation.
That means londiste.py is using PGQ as a transport and queuing mecanism, and
"only" cares about replaying modification on the subscriber(s).
PostgreSQL extensions
The big extention I'm working on is prefix, but I sometime work on other
stuff too. Some of them are not cleaned enough to get published (even in a
public CVS)...
prefix search indexing, a PostgreSQL GiST module
This project is described in its own page, in short prefix is about speeding up prefix lookups for them to be fast. The prefix here is not the literal but the column value:
SELECT * FROM prefixes WHERE prefix @> 'literal';
preprepare
The pre_prepare module aims to prepare all your statements as soon as
possible and in a way that allows client queries not to bother at all and
just call EXECUTE. It's a C-coded PostgreSQL extension in order to be able
to preload it at backend start, but local_preload_libraries currently can
not initialize SPI, so it could be a simple plpgsql script.
btree_fr_ops
A BTree OPERATOR CLASS which will use the following hardcoded collation
setting in the index, allowing for sorting and comparing in it when the
cluster is in another locale:
#define BTREE_FR_OPS_COLLATION "fr_FR.UTF8"
The extension defines its own set of operators, in order not to step on
standard provided operators shoes, it does this in a specific schema. So
you'll have to have this schema in your search_path in order to use the
index.
It's yet to be proven correct and useful, but if you're interrested it's online: btree_fr_ops.
PostgreSQL backports (available as extensions)
Sometime you need newer features of PostgreSQL in past releases. In those case, and when it's possible, I tend to backport the new feature and make the work available on the backports pgfoundry's project. And here's a maintained list of those.
Please note that I'm not making releases at the moment, for lack of interest and demand, so take the code from the CVS. As I'm using debian you should be able to build a package with:
debuild -us -uc
min_update
This is part of the backports project and is indeed a backport of the
suppress_redundant_updates_trigger that Andrew Dunstan made and commited
into 8.4. The name of the trigger is intentionnaly not the same in order for
smoothing the upgrade:
BEGIN; CREATE TRIGGER ... ON tablename ... suppress_redundant_updates_trigger(); ALTER TABLE tablename DISABLE TRIGGER _min_update; COMMIT;
uuid
New in 8.3, the uuid datatype allows one to store UUID values in your
database, compare them, index them, etc. So here is an 8.2 version of it, as
an extension.
uuid-ossp
Now that you're able to store UUID, you want to generate them to, right? For
this you need to link to an existing external library, PostgreSQL project
choosed the ossp one, but it's not available on as many platforms as the
main project is, so it's an additional supplied module in 8.3.
For this to work while being simple to install and configure (read, you have
nothing more than debuild or make install to care about) I've duplicated
some code from uuid into uuid-ossp. So now it's possible to SELECT
uuid_generate_v4(); from an 8.2 database.
debian packaging
They have a nice developer QA page where to see the packages I'm maintaining currently. If you have something simple I can get my hands on easily, and want it to get to debian, I'm open to discussion :)
Emacs
Emacs is made in a way that being a user of it means you're maintaining some code... and (of course) I've published some of it.
ClusterSSH Emacs Lisp implementation, cssh.el
ClusterSSH is about opening any number of xterm, ssh to a different remote
machine in each one of them, and providing user a unique input line to rule
them all.
ClusterSSH.el is about doing the same without quitting emacs, using term.el
as the terminal emulator and the ClusterSSH major mode for ruling them all.
rcirc groups mode
This mode maintains a *Group* like buffer for rcirc, an included IRC
client. It's called rcirc-groups.el.