Pretty picture of databases

The much loved

postgresql_autodoc -t dot

provides output that can be used as input by the graphviz tool. Which in turn can save the pretty pictures it draws to a pdf or, well... pretty much whatever format bats your whiffleball. Mighty impressive set of tools, and free down the whole chain. And then they gave me Visio, I added the ODBC driver and blammo: pretty database drawing. There's nothing free about Visio, but I have to say, the results are impressive.

Slony-I and Rail / Bricolage / etc

Handling the DDL produced by Ruby on Rails or Bricolage and friends presents an interesting problem for people who want to replicated their database using slony. Rails, bricolage and others of that breed don't seem to differentiate between DML and DDL, and haven't yet learned about DCL. They simply want to run as a database super-user and damn the torpedoes. I remain somewhat worried about the ongoing maintenance costs and security risks that this approach creates, but apparently it's cool since it lets those crazy RoR dudes throw stuff out the door at a stunning rate. While I don't see a clear solution to the Vietnam of CS I can at least see an approach that would let Rails and friends co-exist with slony. There's no rule that DDL can only be executed via slonik's EXECUTE SCRIPT. However slonik gives the RoR maintainers everything they need to know in order to correctly process DDL in the slony world. I'd find such a solution extremely interesting, however I doubt that the RoR guys will be interested. Slony is after all a postgresql only technology and RoR types seem to be more interested in chasing mindlessly after "database independance".

Cluster Filesystems

Apparently these things are out of the lab and ready for production. Or at least that's what the marketing departments are saying. I'm going to use this post to keep track of investigations into the following file systems, with the hope of separating reality from hype. Eventually this might even turn into a proper article. But probably not.

1. ADIC SNFS
2. IBM GPFS
3. CFS Lustre

If you know me, then the goal will be obvious: finally a reliable, scalable, high performance file system upon which to host high availability PostgreSQL databases.