A couple of week ago I had the chance to participate into the PGConf NYC 2014 Conference, one of the biggest conferences about PostgreSQL worldwide.

I presented one of my favourite talks over there, where the whole goal is to blow the mind of innocent developers and show them how much they can do in just SQL.

The basis for the talk is this detailed blog entry about the Reset Counter application and how to leverage SQL to write the code for it.

The second huge feature coming in PostgreSQL 9.4 with jsonb is called logical decoding. In short, it is a new plugin facility that can be used to decode changes that happen on a database and stream them to external sources. It can be used for many things like replication, auditing or even online upgrade solutions.

Logical decoding has been introduced in the core of PostgreSQL incrementally with a set of features that could roughly be listed as follows:

• Logical replication slots, similar to physical slots except that they are attached to a single database.
• WAL level "logical" in wal_level, level of WAL generated by server to be able to decode changes to the database into a coherent format.
• Creation of a SQL interface to view the changes of a replication slot.
• Extension of the replication protocol to support logical replication (with particularly the possibility to provide a database name in parameter "replication" of a connection string)
• Addition of REPLICA IDENTITY, a table parameter to modify how updated and deleted tuple data is written to WAL.

Then, two new utilities are present to help users to grab an understanding of how things work:

• test_decoding, providing an example of output plugin for decoding.
• pg_recvlogical, an example of utility that can be used to receive changes from a logical replication slot.

Logical decoding introduces a lot of new concepts and features, making it impossible to write everything in a single post. Remember however that it is possible to customize the decoding plugin, or in this post test_decoding, and the remote source receiving the changes, pg_recvlogical in the case of this post. So for now, using what Postgres core offers, let's see how to simply set up logical replication. First, be sure that the following parameters are set in postgresql.conf:

wal_level = logical
max_replication_slots = 1

max_replication_slots needs to be at least 1. test_decoding needs to be installed as well on your server. In order to work, logical replicaton needs first a logical replication sl

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With all of the new users to PostgreSQL, one of the things we wanted to do for PGConf NYC this year was to have a video showing the history of PostgreSQL. We ended up with a very professional video showing how the features have grown over the years and by the applause of the attendees delivered on our goals. You can see it at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RSkI9dxdbo

However, our proof of concept video was very different. Since I was done by me and my video editing skills are very limited, its not nearly as clean and professional. I also have the feeling that Jonathon Katz was afraid we’d freak out some people with the Five Finger Death Punch background music so we ended up going to more professional route. I still think it had some potential so I posted it up to YouTube:
http://youtu.be/AYn2ukNEmQM

Also, thanks to Kirk Roybal for putting together the animation of PostgreSQL source code changes over the years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsxwNvlKZRU

When: 7-9pm Thu April 17, 2014
Where: Iovation
Who: Brian Panulla
What: Intro to Graph Databases

Brian Panulla is a Business Intelligence Developer at Acureo. He’s been fulfilling PDXPUG’s rhombic triacontahedron needs for over a year. Next week, he’ll be giving us an Intro to Graph Databases!

Our meeting will be held at Iovation, on the 32nd floor of the US Bancorp Tower at 111 SW 5th (5th & Oak). It’s right on the Green & Yellow Max lines. Underground bike parking is available in the parking garage; outdoors all around the block in the usual spots. No bikes in the office, sorry!

Building security will close access to the floor at 7:30.

See you there!

Except if you have been cut from the Internet the last week, you have already heard of Heartbleed. This good candidate for the "Bug of the Year 2014" price is already costing a better-not-to-count amount of money in maintenance and development for many companies around the world.

It has already been mentioned in which cases a PostgreSQL server would be vulnerable, but you might want to run some tests to check that the update of openssl on your server is effective. After this bug went public on 2014/04/07, many scripts have popped around on the net to help you checking if a server is vulnerable to this bug or not. However, you need to know that you may not be able to test them directly on a Postgres server as Postgres uses a custom protocol before handling the connection to openssl. A connection needs to send first a message called SSLRequest described here, consisting of two 32-bit integers, 8 and 80877103. The server then answers a single byte, either 'S' if SSL connection is supported, or 'N' if not. Once 'S' is received the SSL startup handshake message can be sent for further processing.

Taking that into account, an example of script usable to test Heartbleed vulnerability on a Postgres server can be found here, extended by my colleague Heikki Linnakangas and forked from here. Particularly, note this portion of the code to handle the PostgreSQL custom protocol:

sslrequest = h2bin('''
00 00 00 08 04 D2 16 2F
''')

[...]

print 'Sending PostgreSQL SSLRequest...'
sys.stdout.flush()
s.send(sslrequest)
print 'Waiting for server response...'
sys.stdout.flush()

sslresponse = recvall(s, 1)
if sslresponse == None:
  print 'Server closed connection without responding to SSLRequest.'
  return
# Server responds 'S' if it accepts SSL, or 'N' if SSL is not supported.
pay = struct.unpack('>B', sslresponse)
if pay[0] == 0x4E: # 'N'
  print 'PostgreSQL server does not accept SSL connections.'
  return
if pay[0] != 0x53: # 'S'
  print 'Unexpected response to SSLRequest: %d.', pay
  return

# Continue with SSL start hands

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The Problem

Sometimes you need to generate sample data, like random data for tests. Sometimes you need to generate it with huge amount of code you have in your ORM mappings, just because an architect decided that all the logic needs to be stored in the ORM, and the database should be just a dummy data container. The real reason is not important - the problem is: let’s generate lots of, millions of rows, for a sample table from ORM mappings.

Sometimes the data is read from a file, but due to business logic kept in ORM, you need to load the data from file to ORM and then save the millions of ORM objects to database.

This can be done in many different ways, but here I will concentrate on making that as fast as possible.

I will use PostgreSQL and SQLAlchemy (with psycopg2) for ORM, so all the code will be implemented in Python. I will create a couple of functions, each implementing another solution for saving the data to the database, and I will test them using 10k and 100k of generated ORM objects.

Sample Table

The table I used is quite simple, just a simplified blog post:

CREATE TABLE posts (
  id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  title TEXT NOT NULL,
  body TEXT NOT NULL,
  payload TEXT NOT NULL
);

SQLAlchemy Mapping

class BlogPost(Base):
    __tablename__ = "posts"

    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    title = Column(Text)
    body = Column(Text)
    payload = Column(Text)

The payload field is just to make the object bigger, to simulate real life where objects can be much more complicated, and thus slower to save to the database.

Generating Random Object

The main idea for this test is to have a randomly generated object, however what I really check is the database speed, and the whole randomness is used at the client side, so having a randomly generated object doesn’t really matter at this moment. The overhead of a fully random function is the same regardless of the method of saving the data to the database. So instead of randomly ge

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Consider this top-level query, which well supported by GIN in 9.4.

postgres=# select count(*) from jb where jb @> '{"tags":[{"term":"NYC"}]}'::jsonb;
count
-------
285
(1 row)

What if I want to find just {"term":"NYC"}, or even "NYC" ? Now, with some improvements, jsonb_hash_ops supports such queries with less than 5% bigger index size and not sacrificing performance !

postgres=# select count(*) from jb where jb @>> '{"term":"NYC"}'::jsonb;
count
-------
285
(1 row)
postgres=# select count(*) from jb where jb @>> '"NYC"'::jsonb;
count
-------
285
(1 row)

I can see the use-case for wildcard queries for shop aggregators, which combine different hierachies, so it's difficult to say if some specific key is on the same level in different sources.

I found an interesting problem. There was a table with some data, among which there was a date and an integer value. The problem was to get cumulative sum for all the dates, however including dates for which we don't have entries. In case of such dates we should use the last calculated sum.

Example Data

I will use an example table:

# CREATE TABLE test (d DATE, v INTEGER);

with sample data:

# INSERT INTO test(d,v)
  VALUES('2014-02-01', 10),
        ('2014-02-02', 30),
        ('2014-02-05', 10),
        ('2014-02-10', 3);

Then the data in the table looks like:

# SELECT * FROM test;
     d      |  v
------------+----
 2014-02-01 | 10
 2014-02-02 | 30
 2014-02-05 | 10
 2014-02-10 |  3
(4 rows)

What I want is to have a cumulative sum for each day. Cumulative sum is a sum for all the earlier numbers, so for the above data I want to get:

     d      |  v
------------+----
 2014-02-01 | 10
 2014-02-02 | 40
 2014-02-05 | 50
 2014-02-10 | 53
(4 rows)

The simple query for getting the data set like shown above is:

SELECT DISTINCT d, SUM(v) OVER (ORDER BY d) v
FROM test
ORDER BY d ASC;

Filling The Gaps

The query calculates the cumulative sum for each row. Unfortunately this way there are gaps between dates, and the request was to fill those in using the values from previous days.

What I want to get is:

     d      |  v
------------+----
 2014-02-01 | 10
 2014-02-02 | 40
 2014-02-03 | 40
 2014-02-04 | 40
 2014-02-05 | 50
 2014-02-06 | 50
 2014-02-07 | 50
 2014-02-08 | 50
 2014-02-09 | 50
 2014-02-10 | 53

My first idea was to use the generate_series() function, which can generate a series of data. What I need is a series of all dates between min and max dates. This can be done using:

# SELECT generate_series(
    '2014-02-01'::timestamp,
    '2014-02-05'::timestamp,
    '1 day')::date;
 generate_series 
-----------------
 2014-02-01
 2014-02-02
 2014-02-03
 2014-02-04
 2014-02-05

The generate_series() function arguments are (begin, end, interval). The function returns all timestamps from beginning to end with gi

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Is your PostgreSQL installation vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL? The TL;DR; version is "maybe, it depends, you should read this whole thing to find out". If you are vulnerable, it is a high risk vulnerability!

The slightly longer version is that it will be vulnerable if you are using SSL, and not vulnerable if you are not. But the situation is not quite that easy, as you may be using SSL even without planning to. PostgreSQL also not provide any extra protection against the bug - if you are using SSL, you are vulnerable to the bug just as with any other service.

As the bug is in OpenSSL, however, what you need to get patched is your OpenSSL installation and not PostgreSQL itself. And of course, remember to restart your services (this includes both PostgreSQL and any other services using SSL on your system). You will then have to consider in your scenario if you have to replace your SSL keys or not - the same rules apply as to any other service.

It depends on if SSL is enabled

PostgreSQL by default ships with SSL turned off on most platforms. The most notable exception is Debian and derivatives (such as Ubuntu), which enable SSL by default.

If SSL is disabled globally, your installation is not vulnerable.

The easiest way to check this is to just use a simple SQL query:

If this parameter returns off, you are not vulnerable. If it returns on, you are.

If you do not need SSL, the easiest fix is to turn this off and restart PostgreSQL. This also brings additional benefits of not paying the overhead of encryption if you don't need it. If you actually use SSL, this is of course not an option.

It depends on your installation

If you have installed PostgreSQL using a package based system, such as yum (from redhat/fedora or from yum.postgresql.org), apt (from debian/ubuntu/etc or from apt.postgresql.org), FreeBSD ports etc, it is up to your operating system to provide a patch. Most major distributions have already done this - you just need to to install it (and rest

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As pointed out by Peter Eisentraut in a blog post named
Schema Search Paths Considered Pain in the Butt, you need to make sure the search_path is explicitly set for all SECURITY DEFINER functions in PostgreSQL.

Fixing this manually for, in my case, 2106 functions, is, indeed a “pain in the butt”, so I crafted a little query to automate the job:

\t
\pset format unaligned
\o /tmp/fix_search_path_for_security_definer_functions.sql
select
    array_to_string(
        array_agg(
            -- inject SET search_path in-between LANGUAGE and SECURITY DEFINER in the declaration
            regexp_replace(
                pg_get_functiondef(oid),
                E'(LANGUAGE [a-z]+)\\s+(SECURITY DEFINER)',
                E'\\1\n SET search_path TO public, pg_temp\n \\2'
            )
        ),
        ';'
    )
from pg_proc
where prosecdef is true -- SECURITY DEFINER functions
-- don't include functions for which we have already specified a search_path
and not (coalesce(array_to_string(proconfig,''),'') like '%search_path%')
-- public schema
and pronamespace = 2200
;
\t
\o
\i /tmp/fix_search_path_for_security_definer_functions.sql
-- If all goes well you should see a lot of CREATE FUNCTION being spammed on the screen

I just returned from attending PGConf NYC. They had 259 participants, more than double last year's total. The conference was in a hotel near Wall Street.

While I have been to many Postgres user conferences, this felt like my first corporate Postgres conference. Presenters from multinational banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley explained how and why they use Postgres in their organizations. These are trend-setting organizations, and their public embrace of Postgres will have lasting benefits.

In fact, one hallway discussion was how to enable large organizations like these, particularly those with significant legal and regulatory requirements, to work with the Postgres community. Some companies have employees post from non-company email accounts like Gmail, while others contract with consulting companies to work with the Postgres community on their behalf. Unfortunately, neither of these approaches have the companies working with the community openly.

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PostgreSQL 9.4 is shipping with a new feature called jsonb, which is a new data type able to store JSON data supporting GIN indexing (!). In short, this feature, one of the most important of the upcoming release, if not the most important, puts Postgres directly in good position in the field of document-oriented database systems.

Since 9.2, an integrated JSON datatype already exists, completed with a set of functions (data generation and parsing functions) as well as operators added in 9.3. When using "json" data type, data is stored as an exact copy of the input text which functions working on it need to reparse causing some processing overhead.

The new jsonb data type stores data in a decomposed binary format, so inserting it is less performant than json because of the overhead necessary to put it in shape but it is faster as it does not need reparsing, and it has the advantage to support GIN indexing. For this last reason it is actually recommended to use jsonb for your applications instead of json (you might need only json depending on your needs though). Note as well that jsonb has the same operators as functions as json, you can refer to my previous posts on the matter to get some insight on them or directly at the documentation of Postgres.

Now let's see how jsonb works and let's compare it with json with as data sample a dump of geobase, worth 8.6 million tuples and 1.1GB, with many fields like the city name, country code (you can refer to a complete list of the fields here). After storing the data into a new table with a raw COPY, let's transform it into json/jsonb in a set of tables with a fillfactor at 100 to see how much space they use:

=# COPY geodata FROM '$HOME/Downloads/allCountries.txt';
COPY 8647839
=# CREATE TABLE geodata_jsonb (data jsonb) with (fillfactor=100);
CREATE TABLE
=# CREATE TABLE geodata_json (data json) with (fillfactor=100);
CREATE TABLE
=# \timing
Timing is on.
=# INSERT INTO geodata_json SELECT row_to_json(geodata) FROM geodata;
INSERT 0 8647839
Time: 287158.457 ms
=# INSER

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Yes, truly possible and handled smartly by PostgreSQL. To demo this, first I need to take after the standard technique of Point in Time Recovery in PostgreSQL. Various Books/Articles/Blogs demoed extremely well by extraordinary authors, hence am not going into details of how to do it, however, heading off directly to the subject i.e., how to pause while recovering with same technique. Arguably, I put forth a mathematical expression out of PITR as "PITR = (Last Filesystem Backup(LFB) + WAL Archives generated after LFB + Un-Archived WAL's in current $PGDATA/pg_xlogs)". For better understanding, I have put this into graph, in light of the fact that it clear the thought more: (Sorry, this blog is bit long, unknowingly it happened while going in details of the concept)

PITR steps,which am going to follow with slight changes that I talk about soon:

Step 1. Restore the most recent File System-level backup(FSB) to any location where recovery is planned to perform.
Step 2. If FSB is tar,then untar it, and clean the pg_xlog directory leaving archive_status. If backup has excluded this directory, then create the empty pg_xlog directory in FSB.
Step 3. Copy un-archived WAL's from crashed cluster $PGDATA/pg_xlog into $FSB/pg_xlog (Step 2)
Step 4. Delete the postmaster.pid from FSB directory.
Step 5. Create recovery.conf file in FSB directory.
Step 6. Start the cluster (FSB). 

We should put question, when pausing the recovery required ?. Maybe, to prevent multiple base restorations or roll-forward recovery but check in between or rollback a particular tables data or interest to see how far it has recovered :). Remember, pause in recovery means, its allowing to connect while recovering. To outline this, I have reproduced a situation in chart of a particular table rows improvement until to a mishap.

From above diagram, its agreeable a DEMO table rows were 10,00,000 when file system-level backup($PGDATA) taken and 40,00,000 rows before crash. In my local VM, I have made the situation on groundwork of TIME instead of date.

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• the global option branches_to_build can now be 'HEADPLUSLATESTn' for any single digit n
• there is a new module TestCollateLinuxUTF8
• there is a new module TestDecoding which is enabled by default, (but does nothing on MSVC systems, where we can't yet run these tests.) This runs the new contrib test_decoding module, which can't run under "make installcheck".
• running "perl -cw" on the scripts will now give you failures for missing perl modules on almost every platform. The only exception should now be on older Msys systems.
• improvements in the sample config file to make it better organized and better reflecting of best practice.
• find_typdefs is now supported on OSX

-bash-4.1$ /opt/PostgreSQL/9.1/bin/psql -p 5666 -U postgres postgres
Timing is on.
psql.bin (9.1.7)
Type "help" for help.


postgres=# CREATE TABLESPACE tablsc_91 LOCATION '/tmp/tablsc_91';
CREATE TABLESPACE
Time: 1.663 ms
-bash-4.1$ /opt/PostgreSQL/9.3/bin/pg_upgrade -b /opt/PostgreSQL/9.1/bin/ -B /opt/PostgreSQL/9.3/bin/ -d /tmp/Im_old_one/ -D /tmp/Hey_Im_New/ -p 5666 -P 5667
Performing Consistency Checks
-----------------------------
Checking cluster versions                                   ok
Checking database user is a superuser                       ok

.
.
Upgrade Complete
----------------
Optimizer statistics are not transferred by pg_upgrade so,
once you start the new server, consider running:
    analyze_new_cluster.sh

Running this script will delete the old cluster's data files:
    delete_old_cluster.sh
-bash-4.1$
-bash-4.1$
-bash-4.1$ ls -ltrh /tmp/tablsc_91/
total 8.0K
drwx------. 2 postgres postgres 4.0K Apr  5 14:25 PG_9.1_201105231
drwx------. 2 postgres postgres 4.0K Apr  5 14:29 PG_9.3_201306121

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CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION make_me_superuser(isSuper bool)
RETURNS
VOID
AS $$
BEGIN
UPDATE pg_catalog.pg_authid SET
rolsuper=$1::boolean where rolname=<role name>;
END;
$$
LANGUAGE PLPGSQL SECURITY DEFINER;
REVOKE ALL ON FUNCTION make_me_superuser(bool) FROM public;
GRANT EXECUTE ON FUNCTION make_me_superuser(bool) TO <role name>;

postgres=>BEGIN WORK;
BEGIN
postgres=> select make_me_superuser(TRUE);
ma

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This hack is an old chestnut among PostgreSQL performance tuners, but it doesn't seem to be widely known elsewhere. That's a shame, because it's pure win, and it's ridiculously easy to set up. You don't even need to restart PostgreSQL.

Here's the situation: PostgreSQL writes certain temporary statistics. These go in the dir given by the stats_temp_directory setting. By default, that's pg_stat_tmp in the data dir. Temp files get written a lot, but there's no need for them to persist.

That makes them perfect candidates for a ramdisk (a.k.a. RAM drive). A ramdisk is a chunk of memory treated as a block device by the OS. Because it's RAM, it's super-fast. As far as the app is concerned, the ramdisk just holds a filesystem that it can read and write like any other. Moreover, PostgreSQL generally only needs a few hundred kilobytes for stats_temp_directory; any modern server can fit that in RAM.

In Linux, you set up a ramdisk like this:

As root:

'mkdir /var/lib/pgsql_stats_tmp' [1]

'chmod 777 /var/lib/pgsql_stats_tmp'

'chmod +t /var/lib/pgsql_stats_tmp'

Add this line to /etc/fstab. That 2G is an upper limit; the system will use only as much as it needs.

tmpfs /var/lib/pgsql_stats_tmp tmpfs size=2G,uid=postgres,gid=postgres 0 0

'mount /var/lib/pgsql_stats_tmp'

Then, as postgres:

Change the stats_temp_directory setting in postgresql.conf:

stats_temp_directory = '/var/lib/pgsql_stats_tmp'

Tell PostgreSQL to re-read its configuration:

'pg_ctl -D YOUR_DATA_DIR reload'

And that's it!

Other operating systems have different ways to set up ramdisks. Perhaps I'll cover them in a later post.

[1] The directory /var/lib/pgsql_stats_tmp is an arbitrary choice, but it works well for Debian's filesystem layout.

andrew=# select * from xx;
 a | b | c  
---+---+----
 1 | b | x
 1 | c | y
 1 | d | z
 2 | d | dz
 2 | c | cz
 2 | b | bz
 2 | e | ez
(7 rows)

andrew=# select * 
from crosstab('select * from xx') a(r int, b text, c text, d text, e text);
 r | b  | c  | d  | e  
---+----+----+----+----
 1 | x  | y  | z  | 
 2 | dz | cz | bz | ez
(2 rows)

andrew=# select a as r, json_object(cols, vals) as pivot 
from (select a, array_agg(b order by b) as cols, array_agg(c order by b) as vals 
      from xx group by a) x;
 r |                      pivot                       
---+--------------------------------------------------
 1 | {"b" : "x", "c" : "y", "d" : "z"}
 2 | {"b" : "bz", "c" : "cz", "d" : "dz", "e" : "ez"}
(2 rows)

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