Postgres Weekly Issue 22
August 7, 2013
Featured
A look at Foreign Data Wrappers
The two things keeping me most excited about the future of Postgres are 1. Extensions and 2. Foreign Data Wrappers or FDWs. Here I take a look at getting setup and working with the Postgres FDW available in Postgres 9.3.
Craig Kerstiens
Postgres 9.4 Commitfest 1 Wrap-Up
Year after year Postgres has continued to pack in improvements, the first commitfest for PostgreSQL 9.4 is now complete and it turned out to be the busiest initial commitfest of any release to date. Take a look at the slew of great features that we can start to expect with 9.4.
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The rest
Time in PostgreSQL: The simple way
Dealing with time in almost any language is painful, fortunately Postgres aims to make it much easier with its robust support. Heres a great simple guide showing how to work better with them in Postgres.
The Most Popular Pub Names
@tapoueh has ported an example of working with location data in Mongo over to Postgres. This great example loads open street map data into Postgres, then shows how you can compute distance with the earth distance extension
Postgres Dollar Quoting
As a follow on to the documenting your database post last week @danfarina offered up an additional method which can help in better documenting your database through using dollar quoting.
Craig Kerstiens
Why use OVER() instead of a CROSS JOIN?
Cross joins are commonly used for certain types of reporting things over time, though Postgres has a better way. Using common table expressions or CTEs and the OVER() command you can get the same result with improved performance.
One-liner Instant Postgres for your development environment
If you're looking to setup a dev environment for yourself, or even more so for a group of people heres a great and simple one line solution thanks to @denibertovic and Docker.