Fri, 21 May 2010
PGCon 2010 wrapped up and as usual, there are exciting things ahead for PostgreSQL.
Our anti-spam products make extensive use of PostgreSQL; I've been using the database since 1999 when it was at version 6.5. As I write this, version 9.0 is just around the corner and the improvements in the software have been nothing short of amazing. PostgreSQL has always had a professional, disciplined development team. Their documentation is a pleasure to read and navigate and the software has never let us down. I'd rank it as one of the top ten highest-quality software systems (not just databases or open-source projects: It's in the plain top ten.)
What I'm looking forward to most is hot standby with streaming replication. This allows backup databases to stay almost-current with the master (instead of having to wait for an entire WAL file to be shipped) and allows for read-only queries to be made against backup databases even while they are replaying the WAL. This solves one of the biggest annoyances with our CanIt product: It effectively eliminates the database as a single point of failure.
A really cool talk at PGCon was one on Postgres-XC which allows for synchronous replication of tables, and for sharding of other tables. We spent enormous effort to build a horizontal sharding system into CanIt to achieve horizontal scalability. It still isn't in production use in a major way. If Postgres-XC proves successful, we can pretty much throw away all our sharding work and just use Postgres-XC directly. That's both gratifying and highly annoying.
Anyway, PGCon is over and it's back to work on Tuesday where I have the joy of wrestling an evil PHP web interface into submission...