Dimitri Fontaine has been working on adding extension packaging functionality to PostgreSQL for a while. His hard work has paid off and PostgreSQL 9.1 will have extensions. How will extensions work? At a cursory glance, extensions are similar to libraries or DLLs in the programming world. Extensions are packaged units of code that can be installed using the CREATE EXTENSION command. This command will execute a script file that installs any of the extensions objects, including any C code that needs to be built or loaded.

Past Articles I’ve written a few times about writing – The Act of Reading and The Act of Writing. I thought that it would be good to put together a grab bag of some of my favorite writing tips and tricks to make life just a little bit easier for people who want to get better at writing. On the Act of Reading In The Act of Reading I talk about how it’s important to actively read as part and parcel of getting better as an author.

One of my favorite features of EC2 is the ability to create virtual machine templates and re-use them to create fresh copies of a virtual machine. This is great but things rapidly get onerous when you’re trying to duplicate infrastructure. Amazon recently unveiled a new service called AWS CloudFormation. There are currently many Amazon cloud offerings available: S3, Elastic Block Storage, EC2, and Elastic Beanstalk are just a few. AWS CloudFormation is more than just another member of the family: it ties them all together.

Why Should I Worry About Licensing? You probably just have a blog, or maybe you haven’t even started blogging yet. Maybe you’re just sharing your thoughts on Facebook Notes or Google Pages. However you look at it you’re probably certain that you don’t need to worry about your writing on the web. It is, after all, your content. Think again. In all fairness, Facebook’s terms of use are some of the more consumer friendly terms of service out there.

Developers! DBAs! Has this ever happened to you? [caption id=“attachment_2222” align=“alignright” width=“200”] Surprise! It’s a database migration error![/caption] You’re chugging along on a Friday night getting ready for your weekend deployment. Your 2 liter of Shasta is ice cold, you have your all Rush mix tape, and you’re wearing tube socks with khakis. Things are looking up. You open up your deployment script. You’re confident because you’ve tested it in the QA environment and everything worked.

A while back we talked about getting faster writes with Riak. Since then, I’ve been quiet on the Riak front. Let’s take a look at how we can get data out of Riak, especially since I went to great pains to throw all of that data into Riak as fast as my little laptop could manage. Key filtering is a new feature in Riak that makes it much easier to restrict queries to a subset of the data.

A friend of mine half-jokingly says that the only reason to put data into a database is to get it back out again. In order to get data out, we need to ensure some kind of durability. Relational databases offer single server durability through write-ahead logging and checkpoint mechanisms. These are tried and true methods of writing data to a replay log on disk as well as caching writes in memory.

It’s a bit early to be updating my goals for 2011, but I’m really excited about this one. Over the course of last week, I wrote an article about loading data into Riak. I had a brief conversation with Mark Phillips (blog | twitter) about adding some of the code to the Riak function contrib. This is where a sane person would say “Yeah, sure Mark, do whatever you want with my code.

While preparing for an upcoming presentation about Riak for the Columbus Ruby Brigade, I wrote a simple data loader. When I initially ran the load, it took about 4 minutes to load the data on the worst run. When you’re waiting to test your data load and write a presentation, 4 minutes is an eternity. Needless to say, I got frustrated pretty quickly with the speed of my data loader, so I hit up the Riak channel on IRC and started digging into the Ruby driver’s source code.

The Last Ten Years My career has been particularly interesting. I’ve been very fortunate to work with a variety of different languages, platforms, databases, frameworks, and people. I started off working with Perl on HP-UX. As I started automating more of my job, I added ASP.NET to the mix. Eventually I learned about databases, first with Oracle, then SQL Server, then with PostgreSQL, and finally back to SQL Server. Along the way I’ve held job a variety of different job titles – system administrator, system engineer, developer, consultant, architect, and database administrator.