Martin Davis
Martin Davis
PostGIS excels at storing, manipulating and analyzing geospatial data. At some point it's usually desired to convert raw spatial data into a two-dimensional representation to utilize the integrative capabilities of the human visual cortex. In other words, to see things on a map. PostGIS is a popular backend for mapping technology, so there are many options to choose from to create maps. Data can be rendered to a raster image using a web map server like GeoServer or MapServer ; it can be conv...
Read MorePaul Ramsey
Paul Ramsey
In a previous life, I worked on a CRM system that really loved the idea of tags. Everything could be tagged, users could create new tags, tags were a key organizing principle of searching and filtering. The trouble was, modeled traditionally, tags can really make for some ugly tables and equally ugly queries. Fortunately, and as usual, Postgres has an answer. Today I’m going to walk through working with tags in Postgres with a sample database of 🐈 cats and their attributes • First, I’ll look at...
Read MoreGreg Sabino Mullane
Greg Sabino Mullane
A question I hear from time to time with Crunchy Data clients and the Postgres community is: When was my Postgres database table created? Postgres does not store the creation date of tables, or any other database object. But fear not, there are a plethora of direct and indirect ways to find out when your table creation happened. Let's go through some ways to do this, ranging from easy to somewhat hard. All these solutions apply to indexes and other database objects, but tables are by far the mos...
Read MoreCraig Kerstiens
Craig Kerstiens
There's a lot of excitement around AI, and even more discussion than excitement. The question of Postgres and AI isn't a single question, there are a ton of paths you can take under that heading... • Can I use Postgres for building AI related apps? Absolutely . • Can Postgres become an autonomous database with AI? Maybe. • Should you use AI to help you troubleshoot issues? Perhaps, but better left to experts. • Should I avoid AI when working with my database? Not at all! Can I use Postgres for...
Read MoreElizabeth Christensen
Elizabeth Christensen
Since humans first started recording data, they’ve been keeping track of time. Time management is one of those absolutely crucial database tasks and Postgres does a great job of it. Postgres has a lot of options for storing and querying time so I wanted to provide an overview of some of the most common needs for storing and retrieving time data. This blog is also available as a hands on tutorial running in your local browser via our Postgres playground. If you ask Postgres what time it is, You...
Read MoreCraig Kerstiens
Craig Kerstiens
Over the past few weeks we've had several customers ask how they should architect their analytics pipeline. Common questions are: • Should we use some kind of data warehouse or time series database? • Is Postgres suitable for that type of workload? • What are the pitfalls that I should worry about before I get started? Should we use some kind of data warehouse or time series database? Is Postgres suitable for that type of workload? What are the pitfalls that I should worry about before I get sta...
Read MoreChristopher Winslett
Christopher Winslett
Note: pgvector 0.5 released HNSW indexes which improved performance significantly. Read more about it HNSW Indexes with Postgres and pgvector . We have additional articles in this Postgres AI series . As we've been helping people get started with AI in Postgres with , there have been few questions around performance. At a basic level, pgvector performance relies on 3 things: 1. Are your queries using indexes? 2. Are you setting your size appropriately for your data set? 3. Do you have enoug...
Read MoreCraig Kerstiens
Craig Kerstiens
Today, we wanted to address some basic principles for better managing data architecture. Postgres is well regarded as a database for traditional system of record. More recently we've been fielding questions on what else can it do, such as: Can it be good for analytics and metrics? The short answer is "yes". When applications expand outside their standard system of record, they add in new types of data and data stores, which introduces complexity managing multiple types of systems. Some common wo...
Read MoreChristopher Winslett
Christopher Winslett
Crunchy Data is getting ready to be at RailsConf 2023 in Atlanta next week and we’ve been thinking about our Rails and ActiveRecord users and customers. One of the easiest ways to improve query performance using an ORM is to lean on as much SQL as you can. I’m going to walk through some of the ActiveRecord basics and how to use some smart SQL to work around N+1 query problems. What do I mean by " CRUD "? It's short-hand for create-read-update-delete . For instance, ORMs make it so nice to do an...
Read MoreChristopher Winslett
Christopher Winslett
"Last time I had data like this, I stored the data in MongoDB." --Me, last week. I told this to a friend while talking through some of their data problems. As Craig likes to say, Crunchy Data is "Just Postgres" , but we also know there are some clear cut use cases where Postgres isn’t the perfect tool for the job. Don’t get us wrong, Postgres is an amazing database and we strongly believe what you should start with for most applications, but that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from more tha...
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