Recent Articles by Greg Sabino Mullane

Test::Database Postgres support

At our recent company meeting, we organized a 'hackathon' at which the company was split into small groups to work on specific projects. My group was Postgres-focused and we chose to add Postgres support to the new Perl module Test::Database. This turned out to be a decent sized task for the few hours we had to accomplish it. The team consisted of...

Using cron and psql to transfer data across databases

I recently had to move information from one database to another in an automatic function. I centralized some auditing information such that specific information about each database in the cluster could be stored in a single table, inside a single database. While I still needed to copy the associated functions and views to each database, I was able ...

Why is my function slow?

I often hear people ask "Why is my function so slow? The query runs fast when I do it from the command line!" The answer lies in the fact that a function's query plans are cached by Postgres, and the plan derived by the function is not always the same as shown by an EXPLAIN from the command line. To illustrate the difference, I downloaded the pagil...

Best practices for cron

Crontab Best Practice Cron is a wonderful tool, and a standard part of all sysadmins toolkit. Not only does it allow for precise timing of unattended events, but it has a straightforward syntax, and by default emails all output. What follows are some best practices for writing crontabs I've learned over the years. In the following discussion, 'cron...