Elizabeth Christensen
Elizabeth Christensen
In a world where everything is stored in following IaC ( infrastructure as code ) you may want the same from your database. For many following this style of engineering modernization we see a focus on IaC and K8s. We have many users standardizing on our PGO Kubernetes Operator to help. But following an IaC approach doesn’t mean you always want to manage your database and be in Kubernetes. For those wanting to forget about their database and trust the uptime, safety, and security of it to s...
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Elizabeth Christensen
Vanilla Postgres has native partitioning? Yes! And it's really good! We frequently get questions like: Can Postgres handle JSON? Can Postgres handle time series data? How scalable is Postgres? Turns out the answer is most usually yes! Postgres, vanilla Postgres, can handle whatever your need is without having to go to a locked in proprietary database. Unless you're really close to the Postgres internals and code releases you might have missed that Postgres natively has partitioning. Our head of...
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Elizabeth Christensen
Logical replication has been around since Postgres 10 and it's just one of the most useful things out there. Need to get your data to a business analytics engine? Want to create an ETL pipeline from Postgres to your data warehouse? Want to test a new version of Postgres locally with your data? Want to consolidate a few databases into one? Logical replication can do all those things! It is a replication tool, which means it will copy some or all of your data to a new location and continue updatin...
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Elizabeth Christensen
PostGIS is one of the most awesome extensions for PostgreSQL and can turn a relational database into a really powerful GIS ( Geographic Information System ). The PostGIS community is really great about documentation and training and this post is aimed at getting you some resources on how to get started with the major components of using PostGIS as a super beginner. I’ll help you get a sample dataset up, import a shape file, and get that all published to a web browser. PostGIS is a Postgres...
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Elizabeth Christensen
One of the things that makes Postgres so awesome for software development is the incredibly useful system of constraints. Constraints are a way to tell Postgres which kinds of data can be inserted into tables, columns, or rows. As an application developer, you're going to build in this logic to your application as well and that’s great. However…adding this logic into your database protects your data long-term from bad data, null statements, or application code that isn't working quite right and...
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Elizabeth Christensen
If you’ve read Crunchy blogs recently you probably noticed by now that we’re all big fans of indexing. Indexing is key to optimizing your database workloads and reducing query times. Postgres now supports quite a few types of indexes and knowing the basics is a key part of working with Postgres. The role of database indexes is similar to the index section at the back of a book. A database index stores information on where a data row is located in a table so the database doesn't have to scan...
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Elizabeth Christensen
Crunchy Data hosted the third annual PostGIS Day on November 18th.This was our second year with a virtual format and another year of record attendance! We had attendees from more than 99 countries. PostGIS is the most popular geospatial database in the world, with: • over 300 vector and raster functions • high performance analytical and transactional functionality • easy integration with all third-party mapping and data processing tools over 300 vector and raster functions high perform...
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Elizabeth Christensen
Additional Contributors: David Christensen, Jonathan Katz , and Stephen Frost Welp… sometimes “stuff” happens… and you find yourself having a really bad day. We'd like to believe that every database is well configured from the start with optimal log rotation, correct alerting of high CPU consumption and cache hit ratio monitoring… But that isn't always the case. Part of our job here at Crunchy is to help on the bad days in addition to preparing you to ensure those never happen. One frustrati...
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Elizabeth Christensen
In my day to day, I'm surrounded by great database engineers. They talk about things like HA and raft protocol and the right and wrong approach for configuring synchronous vs. asynchronous replication. There is a lot of value in all that deep technical knowledge, but for when interacting with customers, I like to boil it down a bit. What I've seen is that for many folks the basics of key database principles can get lost in the details. What follows is a summary of conversations I've had with cus...
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