Introduction

The early architecture of Uber consisted of a monolithic backend application written in Python that used Postgres for data persistence. Since that time, the architecture of Uber has changed significantly, to a model of microservices and new data platforms. …

The post Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL appeared first on Uber Engineering Blog.

Different types of languages deal with this “value” in diverse ways. You can have a more comprehensive list of what NULL can mean on this website. What I like to think about NULL is along the lines of invalid, as if some sort of garbage is stored there. It doesn’t mean it’s empty, it’s just mean that something is there, and it has no value to you.

Databases deal when storing this type in a similar way, PostgreSQL treats it as “unknown” while MySQL treats it as “no data“.

Both databases recommend using \N to represent NULL values where import or exporting of data is necessary.

When …

Leo Polovets of Susa Ventures publishes an excellent blog called Coding VC. There you can find some excellent posts, such as pitches by analogy, and an algorithm for seed round valuations and analyzing product hunt data. He recently wrote a blog post about a topic near and dear to my heart, Which Technologies do Startups […]

Data migrations always have a wide range of challenges. I recently took on a request to determine the difficulty of converting an ecommerce shop's MySQL 5.0 database to PostgreSQL 9.3, with the first (presumably "easier") step being just getting the schema converted and data imported before tackling the more challenging aspect of doing a full assessment of the site's query base to re-write the large number of custom queries that leverage MySQL-specific language elements into their PostgreSQL counterparts.

During the course of this first part, which had contained a number of difficulties I had anticipated, I hit one that I definitely had not anticipated:

ERROR:  value too long for type character varying(20)

Surely, the error message is absolutely clear, but how could this possibly be? The obvious answer--that the varchar definitions were different lengths between MySQL and PostgreSQL--was sadly quite wrong (which you knew, …

In Part 1 of "SFTP virtual users with ProFTPD and Rails", I introduced ProFTPD's virtual users and presented my annotated proftpd.conf that I used to integrate virtual users with a Rails application. Here in Part 2, I'll show how we generate virtual user credentials, how we display them to the user, as well as our SftpUser ActiveRecord model that does the heavy lifting.

Let's start at the top with the SFTP credentials UI. Our app's main workflow actually has users doing most of their uploads through a sweet Plupload widget. So, by default, the SFTP functionality is hidden behind a simple button sitting to the right of the Plupload widget:

The user can click that button to open the SFTP UI, or the Plupload …

Original images from Flickr user jenniferwilliams

One of our clients, for various historical reasons, runs both MySQL and PostgreSQL to support their website. Information for user login lives in one database, but their customer activity lives in the other. The eventual plan is to consolidate these databases, but thus far, other concerns have been more pressing. So when they needed a report combining user account information and customer activity, the involvement of two separate databases became a significant complicating factor.

In similar situations in the past, using earlier versions of PostgreSQL, we've written scripts to pull data from MySQL and dump it into PostgreSQL. This works well enough, but we've updated …

Introduction

Disk I/O is frequently the performance bottleneck with relational databases. With AWS recently releasing 4,000 PIOPs EBS volumes, I wanted to do some benchmarking with pgbench and PostgreSQL 9.2. Prior to this release the maximum available I/O capacity was 2,000 IOPs per volume. EBS IOPs are read and written in 16Kb chunks with their performance limited by both the I/O capacity of the EBS volumes and the network bandwidth between an EC2 instance and the EBS network. My goal isn't to provide a PostgreSQL tuning guide, an EC2 tuning guide, or a database deathmatch complete with graphs; I'll just be displaying what kind of performance is available out-of-the-box without substantive tuning. In other words, this is an exploratory benchmark not a comparative benchmark. I would have liked to compare the performance of 4,000 PIOPs EBS volumes with 2,000 PIOPs EBS volumes, but I ran out of time so that will have to wait for a following …

Introduction

Disk I/O is frequently the performance bottleneck with relational databases. With AWS recently releasing 4,000 PIOPs EBS volumes, I wanted to do some benchmarking with pgbench and PostgreSQL 9.2. Prior to this release the maximum available I/O capacity was 2,000 IOPs per volume. EBS IOPs are read and written in 16Kb chunks with their performance limited by both the I/O capacity of the EBS volumes and the network bandwidth between an EC2 instance and the EBS network. My goal isn't to provide a PostgreSQL tuning guide, an EC2 tuning guide, or a database deathmatch complete with graphs; I'll just be displaying what kind of performance is available out-of-the-box without substantive tuning. In other words, this is an exploratory benchmark not a comparative benchmark. I would have liked to compare the performance of 4,000 PIOPs EBS volumes with 2,000 PIOPs EBS volumes, but I ran out of time so that will have to wait for a following …

Postgres XC explained  Users demand faster processing and as the processing and reports get faster so do the expectation for even faster performance and scalability. Now days its unthinkable not to deliver the performance  and availability.
All of those challenges require a constant search/development of new and improves solutions. Enter Postgres XC just when you were thinking that RDBMS is dead it comes back with the vengeance. So what is exactly Postgres XC and why should anyone care? 
Postgres XC shares a common name with the Postgres RDBMS but this is where the similarities stop, Postgres is a standalone database, Postgres XC on the other hand is a distributed RDBMS in a "share nothing" configuration. With this publication I'll make an attempt to explain Postgres …

Postgres replication for MySQL DBA's Working a with Postgers and MySQL replication I noticed that many MySQL DBA's have hard time grasping Postgres replication and how it works,  you may ask why would you need to know how to setup and use Postgres replication - but lets face it Postgres is becoming ever more popular and many MySQL shops also have Postgres databases. Overall a lot of startups are using a collection of databases  that serve various purposes. I"ll attempt to explain Postgres replication in plain English and use MySQL terms to help adsorb the seemingly complex subject. 
Postgres  "streaming replication" was introduced since Rel. 9.0 of Postgres and is a very useful addition that many of us were waiting for years, personally I strongly believe that the ack of replication kept Postgres from wide adoption unlike MySQL that had the replication from early releases. Replication is a great tool since it …