monetdb_fdw: PostgreSQL meets column store. Finally.

As you may know, FDW is one of the advantages of PostgreSQL. There are variety of FDWs to federate different data sources (including PostgreSQL itself) with PostgreSQL.

And also, you may know everyone in the industry is talking about BigData and analytics everyday. We know that most of them must be a buzz though. :p

Yesterday, I released a brand-new FDW, monetdb_fdw, which allows you to federate MonetDB, an open source column-oriented RDBMS, with PostgreSQL.

The column-store pioneer | MonetDB
http://www.monetdb.org/

MonetDB was originally developed at University of Amsterdam, and it has been well developed and maintained as open source.

PostgreSQL Unconference in Tokyo

Last Saturday, we, Japan PostgreSQL Users Group, had the first PostgreSQL "Unconference" in Tokyo.

The event had about 40 participants and 17 talks in 4 hours, and it was successfully run by the participants.

As you may know, "conference" requires its host to arrange the program *much before* the event starts. As opposed to that, "unconference" doesn't.

"Unconference" is filled with many short talks, typically 10 to 20 minute ones, which need to be arranged at beginning of the event, and running multiple (two or more) sessions at the same time to give a chance to participants to find a topic they are interested in.

What we did and what we saw there.

So, I started the event with saying this:

"Welcome to *the most unprepared event* we've ever had! :) Now is the time to start arranging our program. Please write down the title of your talk on the post-it note, and put it on the white board."

Announcing pg_part extension, a table partitioning utility for PostgreSQL

I'm pleased to announce my first PostgreSQL extension, pg_part extension, to take advantage of table (range) partitioning on PostgreSQL.

• uptimejp/pg_part
  https://github.com/uptimejp/pg_part

In the PostgreSQL world, the table (range) partitioning (a.k.a. Constraint Exclusion) is one of the advantages of PostgreSQL for analytical workloads, but using lots of DDL commands for this purpose still requires some patience.

• PostgreSQL: Documentation: 9.1: Partitioning
  http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/ddl-partitioning.html

This extension provies several SQL functions to allow users manipulating table partitioning on PostgreSQL without executing DDL commands directly. So, pg_part would make it easier to take advantages of the PostgreSQL table partitioning.