Introducing Crunchy Data Warehouse: A next-generation Postgres-native data warehouse. Crunchy Data Warehouse Learn more
Craig Kerstiens
Craig Kerstiens
Last week I was on a call with someone giving an overview of Crunchy Bridge , our multi-cloud fully managed database as a service. During the call they asked about what was the best way to get a sense of how their database was doing, a health check if you will. I mentioned a few monitoring tools such as pganalyze and pgMonitor that were good options, but that we could also dig in live and see how things were. The person I was talking to was very similar to many of the customers we run dat...
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Craig Kerstiens
At most of the places I've worked, the primary language used was not what I gravitated to naturally. If you're going to ask for a language of choice personally, it's python. I appreciate the explicit nature, that it's often pseudocode that can execute and it has a rich ecosystem of libraries (though that’s most languages these days). But as much as anything I latched onto Django in its early days. If you're not familiar with Django it's a popular framework for web apps written in Python. What...
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Craig Kerstiens
Most database services in the cloud have not significantly evolved in the past 5 years. They tend to support the basics of read replicas and backups and then move on to other new shiny services, forgetting about a key pillar of your application: your PostgreSQL database. Today we're looking to change that with the launch of Crunchy Bridge . At Crunchy Data , we believe in the power of Postgres and want to bring all the greatness that is Postgres to all developers. Crunchy Bridge delivers on...
Read MoreCraig Kerstiens
Craig Kerstiens
I'm a big fan of data in general. Data can tell you a lot about what users are doing and can help you gain all sorts of insights. One such aspect is in making recommendations based on past history or others that have made similar choices. In fact, years ago I wrote a small app to see if I could recommend wines based on how other ones were rated. It was a small app that I shared among just a handful of friends, some with similar taste, some with different taste. At first it was largely an academi...
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Craig Kerstiens
Backups are a key staple of running any database. Way back in the day, a good friend and colleague wrote one of the most used Postgres backup tools called wal-e. Wal-e was initially written in just a few days, and rolled out to the fleet of databases we managed in the early days at Heroku. We got pretty lucky with rolling that out, because shortly after we had there was the great AWS Apocalypse of 2011. This was a full day outage of AWS with lingering effects for nearly a week... Reddit was dow...
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Craig Kerstiens
Most queries against a database are short lived. Whether you're inserting a new record or querying for a list of upcoming tasks for a user, you're not typically aggregating millions of records or sending back thousands of rows to the end user. A typical short lived query in Postgres can easily be accomplished in a few milliseconds or less. For the typical application, this means a well tuned production Postgres database is capable of easily running thousands or up to hundreds of thousands of q...
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Craig Kerstiens
At a company where most all people have some Postgres expertise you can easily learn something new from your coworkers every day about Postgres. In my first week I saw a question in our internal slack that I could guess an answer to, but it wasn't definitive. It was "Why have composite types? Why would you use them?". I threw in an answer a few others did as well, but collectively we didn't have anything definitive but all these seemed like valid cases. Composite types ) are a custom type that i...
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