Free VMs for Reviewers

In case you somehow missed it, the second CommitFest for PostgreSQL 9.4 development is underway.  While we don't have quite as many patches in the queue as we had last time, we have quite a few, and more than we've had for any CF2 before.  This means we need as many reviewers as possible!

In order to make sure that nobody is prevented from reviewing due to not having a suitable development environment available, the PostgreSQL community is offering free virtual machines for reviewing and testing patches for this CommitFest.

If you want a VM for this purpose, please email me the following at any point during the CF:

1. Your public SSH key.
2. Which patch(es) you intend to review/test.
3. Preference for CentOS or Ubuntu.
4. When you expect to do the review.

Since these are EC2 virtual servers, they will not be suitable for performance testing.  However, if you want to review a replication patch, we can make multiple VMs available.  All VMs will be terminated at the end of the CF.

VMs will come equipped with all tools required to build PostgreSQL, plus a checkout of the PostgreSQL code from the beginning of the CF.  You may need to install additional requirements yourself if you are reviewing extensions or special features with dependencies.

Note that I may take a day to respond with your VM access.

More about my favorite 9.3 Features (video and more)

If you somehow missed it, PostgreSQL 9.3.0 is now available, just in time for your back-to-school shopping.  9.3 includes lots of great stuff, some of which I've already been using in development, and I'll tell you more about my favorites below.  There's also a survey and we'll have live video of SFPUG doing 9.3 on Thursday.

No More SHMMAX

We didn't emphasize this in the release announcement -- mainly because it's like removing a wart, you won't want to talk about it -- but this is the one 9.3 change liable to make life easier for more developers than any other.  We've stopped using SysV memory for anything other than the postmaster startup lock, which means that you can now adjust shared_buffers to your heart's content without needing to mess with sysctl.conf.  Let alone the satanic incantations you have to go through on the Mac.

This also clears one of the main barriers to writing simple autotuning scripts.  Which means I'm out of excuses for not having written one.

Custom Background Workers

Need a daemon to do background work alongside Postgres, such as scheduling, queueing, maintenance, or replication?  Maybe you want to intercept MongoDB-formatted queries and rewrite them for Postgres?  Custom background workers allow you to create your own "autovacuum daemon" which does whatever you want it to.

Michael Paquier will be presenting Background Workers for SFPUG on Thursday the 12th (7:30PM PDT).  Details on our Meetup Page, including a link to live video for those of you not in the Bay Area.

Streaming-Only Cascading

This has been my biggest desire since 9.2 came out; we were so close to not needing to worry about archiving, ever, for small databases.  And now we're there.  You can make chains of replicas, fail over to one of them, remaster, make a replica at a new data center the master, change the direction of replication, and lots more configurations without needing to worry about WAL archiving and all its overhead.

If you combine this with Heikki's work on pg_rewind, things get even more flexible since you don't have to resnapshot for failback anymore.

I'll be presenting a live demo of this feature at the SFPUG meeting, including connecting replicas in a ring (all replicas -- no master!). 

So, what's your favorite 9.3 feature?  Vote here!