Crunchy Data joins Snowflake. Read the announcement
Marco Slot
Marco Slot
Today I’m excited to introduce pg_incremental , a new open source PostgreSQL extension for automated, incremental, reliable batch processing. This extension helps you create processing pipelines for append-only streams of data, such as IoT / time series / event data workloads. Notable pg_incremental use cases include: • Creation and incremental maintenance of rollups, aggregations, and interval aggregations • Incremental data transformations • Periodic imports or export of new data using standa...
Read MorePaul Ramsey
Paul Ramsey
"Retrieval Augmented Generation" (RAG) is a useful technique in working with large language models (LLM) to improve accuracy when dealing with facts in a restricted domain of interest. Asking an LLM about Shakespeare: works pretty good. The model was probably fed a lot of Shakespeare in training. Asking it about holiday time off rules from the company employee manual: works pretty bad. The model may have ingested a few manuals in training, but not yours ! Is there a way around this LLM limi...
Read MoreKeith Fiske
Keith Fiske
Partitioning is an important database maintenance strategy for a growing application backed by PostgreSQL. As one of the main authors of pg_partman and an engineer here at Crunchy Data, I spend a lot of my time helping folks implement partitioning. One of the nuances of PostgreSQL’s partitioning implementation is the default partition , which I’ll dig into in this post and discuss how to use it effectively. The default partition is pretty much what it sounds like; you can make a special parti...
Read MoreMarco Slot
Marco Slot
PostgreSQL is one of the most versatile data storage and processing tools available. We enhanced it even further by adding Iceberg tables to PostgreSQL in Crunchy Data Warehouse with a fast analytical query engine. What is Iceberg? Iceberg tables are stored in a compressed columnar format for fast analytics in object storage (S3). This means storage is cheap and there are no storage limits. Yet the tables are still transactional and work with nearly all PostgreSQL features. Crunchy Data Wareho...
Read MorePaul Ramsey
Paul Ramsey
In late November, on the day after GIS Day, we hosted the annual PostGIS day online event. 22 speakers from around the world, in an agenda that ran from mid-afternoon in Europe to mid-afternoon on the Pacific coast. We had an amazing collection of speakers, exploring all aspects of PostGIS, from highly technical specifics, to big picture culture and history. A full playlist of PostGIS Day 2024 is available on the Crunchy Data YouTube channel . Here’s a highlight reel of the talks and themes t...
Read MoreMarco Slot
Marco Slot
PostgreSQL is the bedrock on which many of today’s organizations are built. The versatility, reliability, performance, and extensibility of PostgreSQL make it the perfect tool for a large variety of operational workloads. The one area in which PostgreSQL has historically been lacking is analytics, which involves queries that summarize, filter, or transform large amounts of data. Modern analytical databases are designed to query data in data lakes in formats like Parquet using a fast vectorized...
Read MoreGreg Smith
Greg Smith
The OpenStreetMap (OSM) database builds almost 750GB of location data from a single file download. OSM notoriously takes a full day to run. A fresh open street map load involves both a massive write process and large index builds. It is a great performance stress-test bulk load for any Postgres system. I use it to stress the latest PostgreSQL versions and state-of-the-art hardware. The stress test validates new tuning tricks and identifies performance regressions. Two years ago, I presented (...
Read MoreElizabeth Christensen
Elizabeth Christensen
Postgres is being used more and more for analytical workloads. There’s a few hidden gems I recently ran across that are really handy for doing SQL for data analysis, and . Rollup and cube don’t get a lot of attention, but follow along with me in this post to see how they can save you a few steps and enhance your date binning and summary reporting. We also have a web based tutorial that covers Postgres Functions for Rolling Up Data by Date if you want to try it yourself with a sample dat...
Read MoreCraig Kerstiens
Craig Kerstiens
Version 17.2 of PostgreSQL has now released which rolls back the changes to ResultRelInfo. See the release notes for more details. Since its inception Crunchy Data has released new builds and packages of Postgres on the day community packages are released. Yesterday's minor version release was the first time we made the decision to press pause on a release. Why did we not release it immediately? There appeared to be a very real risk of breaking existing installations. Let's back up and walk...
Read MorePaul Ramsey
Paul Ramsey
Large language models (LLM) provide some truly unique capacities that no other software does, but they are notoriously finicky to run, requiring large amounts of RAM and compute. That means that mere mortals are reduced to two possible paths for experimenting with LLMs: • Use a cloud-hosted service like OpenAI . You get the latest models and best servers, at the price of a few micro-pennies per token. • Use a small locally hosted small model. You get the joy of using your own hardware, and on...
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