I was the host for this month's #PGSQLPhriday topic (#005), and decided on the topic question: Is your data relational? This is my submission on the topic, and how I use Postgres for Relational Plus usages.

Non-relational data

Q: What non-relational data do you store in Postgres and how do you use it?

PostGIS is the most prominent non-relational data I am involved with. Pretty much all of the PostGIS data I am involved with is rooted alongside solidly relational data. Want to know demographics of customers within 10 miles of a specific location? The location portion is spatial, the demographic data is relational.

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Welcome to the 5th installment of the #PGSQLPhriday blogging series. I am thrilled to be this month's host! The topic posts should be published by Friday February 3rd.

When Ryan Booz proposed the idea for #PGSQLPhriday I was immediately excited about it. Other than our first names, Ryan and I have a other few things in common. One of these common points is we both started our database careers in the world of MS SQL Server and later found our way to Postgres. My move to Postgres, and why I discovered Postgres, is at the heart of this month's topic for PGSQL Phriday 005.

Is your data relational?

The entire reason I discovered and started using Postgres was PostGIS. I needed PostGIS because I had a project in 2011 that could benefit from the OpenStreetMap data. The project still needed rock solid support for relational data and the SQL Standard, which Postgres also provides. However, it was the spatial support of PostGIS that pulled me into the world of Postgres.

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This blog post is part of PGSQL Phriday #004. Hettie Dombrovskaya is this month's host! I was very excited to see the topic chosen as Postgres and Software Development. My contribution to this month's #pgsqlphriday topic covers how I manage code through our development processes. Check out Hettie's post for more about this month's topic.

Types of code

Before continuing on to the specific questions for the challenge, I want to define the broad groupings of code I work.

• Mission critical
• Not trivial
• Trivial

Mission critical code is where most of the "special sauce" is at. Mission critical SQL code includes DDL commands to create the database structure such as CREATE TABLE foo and CREATE VIEW baz. This level of code represents the data structure that enables everything else to function.

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Postgres has a handy module called auto_explain. The auto_explain module lives up to its name: it runs EXPLAIN automatically for you. The intent for this module is to automatically provide information useful for troubleshooting about your slow queries as they happen. This post outlines a pitfall I recently discovered with auto_explain. Luckily for us, it's an easy thing to avoid.

I discovered this by running CREATE EXTENSION postgis; and watching it run for quite a while before failing with an out of disk space error. That is not my typical experience with a simple CREATE EXTENSION command!

Standard use of auto_explain

A common way auto_explain is used is to target "slow queries" through the setting auto_explain.log_min_duration. This setting defines the number of milliseconds to use as the threshold of when to log the EXPLAIN output. If your queries are typically 10-50 ms, you might decide to set auto_explain.log_min_duration = 100 to log queries taking twice as long as your goal. An instance serving big analytic queries might want to set that much higher, say 2 or 5 seconds.

Innocent testing

I say my testing was innocent because I wasn't trying to break something. That makes it innocent, right? I was playing around with auto_explain trying out PgMustard's scoring API. At the time I didn't want to think about where to set that threshold... I just wanted to capture some explain output for testing. The auto_explain documentation explains that setting auto_explain.log_min_duration = 0 will capture "all plans." Sounds good, let's do that!

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This blog post is for PGSQL Phriday #003. Read Ryan Booz' introduction from September for more details on PGSQL Phriday. Pat Wright (SQL Asylum) is this month's host and chose the topic: What is the PostgreSQL community to you?

TLDR;

The Postgres community is helpful.

One big community with many layers

The remainder of this post explores why I say the Postgres community is helpful. Postgres is an open source project with multiple layers and locations of community. Membership is open, free, and no invite is needed.

Prefer having an invite? You're invited!

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