Postgres Weekly Issue 35
November 6, 2013
Please note Postgres Weekly will be taking a one week break next week, so the next issue will be on Wednesday, November 20. And as always, a big thanks to Craig Kerstiens for continuing to curate Postgres Weekly :-)
Top 10 psql ‘\’ commands I use
psql is incredibly powerful, but the list of options within it can be overwhelming. Heres a straight forward list of @selenamarie’s top 10 commands.
Selena Deckelmann
Binary Storage for Nested Data Structures (hstore) [PDF]
Hstore is already an awesome datatype in Postgres, JSON is quickly gaining ground though for different use cases. In Postgres 9.4 we’ll start to see these two worlds converge more with some great improvements to hstore, which includes multiple types and nested structures. Oh and performance will blow Mongo out of the water. You can read more on Oleg’s post around this as well here
Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev
Explaining the Index of PostgreSQL Indexes
Your application likely has an index or several in places, but if you’re still confused on the differences between GIN and GIST then take a flip through these slides from PG Conf EU to get a clearer picture of those concepts and more.
Jonathan S Katz
Supercharging ActiveRecord (Ruby) with PostreSQL
Postgres is packed with great features, but taking advantage of them in a language is sometimes extra work. Here’s a great talk from a conference and accompanying slides around taking more advantage of Postgres with Ruby's ActiveRecord.
Confreaks
JSON and Speed [PDF]
JSON has some limitations today in terms of overall performance, that doesn’t mean its entirely unusable. With a few simple indexes you can go a long way towards improving things as highlighted here.
Jonathan S Katz
Postgres 9.4 Feature Highlight: Dates with More Than 5-Digit Years
Whether you’ve got a fun application that needs 5 digit years, or the less likely case that you don’t want to upgrade Postgres for another 8,000 years, you’ve got the option now with Postgres 9.4 which introduces 5 digit year support.
Michael Otacoo
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