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Jens Kubieziel recently posted a Twitter poll: 2 + 2 * 4

While attending a conference (yay) the discussion turned to system columns, and especially 'ctid'. This was in context of backups, and the physical position of data on disk. The question was if that can be used to determine if an incremental backup is required, and if it is enough to just copy that field where the 'ctid' points to. Not quite, but I’d like to use this question to describe the system columns more in detail.

Together with Lætitia Avrot and Nikolay Samokhvalov I was invited to participate in a Community Panel about PostgreSQL Upgradability at Postgres Vision 2022. During this panel each of us provided examples for how easy or complicated *PostgreSQL* upgrades still are.

As is a good tradition, the PostgreSQL Project participates in Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Last year we submitted 7 projects for 7 students - and got all 7 projects accepted. This year we got quite a few more good proposals from students, and more mentors are helping. Guess what? Google accepted all 12 proposals!

The one thing I like to do is challenge PostgreSQL - and readers - to the extreme. A while ago I posted about the Beer o'clock. Building Zoé was another interesting example. And at some point I blog about Dancing with the Stars as well. Today it's all about nothing. Empty. Where is all the data gone?

A couple days ago Devrim forked PostgreSQL to get a beer. That effort is of course laudable, but a bit extreme. PostgreSQL is very extensible, and allows to implement a beer now clock with just a few easy steps.

Christophe Pettus posted an interesting challenge. Two strings which on the surface look equal, but if you ask PostgreSQL to compare them, they are not equal.

The Google Summer of Code 2021 for the PostgreSQL Project is wrapped up.

Wow! The PostgreSQL Project got all 7 proposals accepted into Google Summer of Code 2021!

Ansible has a very useful module 'postgresql_ping' which checks connectivity to the database server. I'm using it in quite a few Playbooks as first step just to ensure that the database server is present - this fails early if there is a problem which otherwise just prevents the rest of the Playbook to work properly.