Postgres Weekly Issue 40
December 18, 2013
Some News..
We're taking a Christmas and New Year break so the next issue will be on January 8, 2014.
Also, the Postgres Weekly site has had a huge upgrade and now there are proper, full archives and even full-text search if you want to find something you remember seeing in a previous issue.
As always, thanks to Craig Kerstiens for his work in curating this newsletter. See you in 2014!
The Links
PGConf NYC 2014: April 3-4, New York City
As the Postgres community continues to grow, so too do its conferences. Quickly becoming one of the larger and staple conferences is PGConf NY. The CFP is now open, so get your submissions in and your tickets booked.
PGConf.us
Good Architects Borrow, Great Architects Steal: Building Heroku Postgres
Some interesting details in this talk given at New Relic’s Future Stack conference on how Heroku Postgres architects itself. It hits on some of the good, the bad, and the ugly in how Heroku runs its fleet of over 750,000 Postgres databases.
Peter van Hardenberg
COPY Millions of Rows to Postgres with Rails
Inserting rows one by one is fine when it’s the normal operation for your application, but when doing millions or even thousands of rows at a time it may not be very performant. Postgres’ COPY command is efficient for bulk operations, but you have to be careful in using it.
KadrmasConcepts
Time Series with PostgreSQL
If you’ve ever had the fun of dealing with timestamps in your application, you can appreciate when it’s handled well. Postgres has some great datetime support, and that and some of the relevant functions are highlighted here.
Dev Docs on PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL’s documentation is now included within Dev Docs which provides a nice grouping for browsing documentation online in a possibly more intuitive form. Want to check out specific functions, or datatypes? Give it a look.
DevDocs.io
PostgreSQL Exercises
New to SQL or want to brush up? PG Exercises is a great tool for teaching and verifying your results as you go along.
PGExercises.com
PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy, and Schema-less Data [PDF]
A slidedeck on how to work with Postgres and schema-less data. This time focusing on SQL Alchemy one of the very solid Python ORMs.
PgRest Learning Guide - Introduction
Last week we highlighted PgRest, a tool for quickly setting up a Rest API on Postgres. Here’s another feature on the tool specifically on getting it up and running. If you really want to go even further give the BSON extension a look which Josh Berkus mentions along with PgRest on his blog.
Hsin-Yi Chen
Migrating Graphite from SQLite to PostgreSQL
Here’s another success story of migrating to Postgres. This time it’s from SQLite which is probably a bit different than most migrations. Should you be planning for this yourself hopefully it can help prevent a few gotchas.
Jason Dixon
JSON Support Committed to SQL Alchemy
For Python developers and more specifically SQL Alchemy users, your world just got better with support for the JSON datatype being committed.
Mike Bayer
The All New PostgresWeekly.com
Complete with proper archives, full-text search, and even an RSS feed.
From our sponsor
Heroku Postgres - Fully managed Postgres on EC2
There's a lot to worry about when building your application; ensuring your database is secured, backed up, available shouldn't have to be part of that. Let Heroku Postgres focus on keeping your database running so you can take advantage of all the awesome features within Postgres.

Heroku Postgres is the worlds largest provider of Postgres as a Service, offering fully managed databases on top of EC2. Get started today for free and scale easily as your application needs to.