Latest posts from Greg Sabino Mullane

Version 1.21 of PgBouncer, the Postgres connection pooler, has added a long awaited feature: support for prepared statements inside of transaction mode. Prior to this, one had to choose between using prepared statements (a performance win), and using PgBouncer's transaction mode (also a large performance win). Now, we can have our cake and eat it too 🎂 🎉.

What are prepared statements?

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We've also loaded a tutorial for Day 19's challenge

This article will contain spoilers both on how I solved 2022 Day 18's challenge "Boiling Boulders" using SQL, as well as general ideas on how to approach the problem. I recommend trying to solve it yourself first, using your favorite language.

(heatmap slicing a 3-D piece of lava - all in SQL!)

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Solving Advent of Code 2022 using Postgres - Day 17

(Yes, this image was generated completely by SQL statements!)

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A question I hear from time to time with Crunchy Data clients and the Postgres community is:

When was my Postgres database table created?

Postgres does not store the creation date of tables, or any other database object. But fear not, there are a plethora of direct and indirect ways to find out when your table creation happened. Let's go through some ways to do this, ranging from easy to somewhat hard. All these solutions apply to indexes and other database objects, but tables are by far the most common request.

1. Logging

This article will contain spoilers both on how I solved 2022 Day 16's challenge "Probscidea Volcanium" using SQL, as well as general ideas on how to approach the problem. I recommend trying to solve it yourself first, using your favorite language. This article is delayed from the actual puzzle's release. My solutions may not be the "best" solution, as the goal is to provide a quick solution.

Hands on Tutorial

In an earlier post, I went into a lot of detail about unlogged tables. But tables are not the only thing to get the unlogged treatment - as of version 15 of Postgres, sequences can be unlogged as well! If you want to create your own, it's simply a matter of adding the UNLOGGED

While supporting customers at Crunchy Data, I sometimes see users add unlogged tables. In this post, I'm going to review some of the specifics about this.

Unlogged tables in Postgresql are a way of preventing specific tables from generating WAL (Write Ahead Log) information by adding the unlogged

This article will contain spoilers both on how I solved 2022 Day 15's challenge "Beacon Exclusion Zone" using SQL, as well as general ideas on how to approach the problem. I recommend trying to solve it yourself first, using your favorite language. This article is delayed from the actual puzzle's release. Also note that my solutions are seldom going to be the "best" solutions - they were solved as quickly as possible, and these articles will show my first solutions, with some minor reformatting and cleaning up.

Hands on Tutorial

Disclaimer

This article will contain spoilers both on how I solved 2022 Day 14's challenge "Regolith Reservoir" using SQL, as well as general ideas on how to approach the problem. I recommend trying to solve it yourself first, using your favorite language. This article is delayed from the actual puzzle's release. Also note that my solutions are seldom going to be the "best" solutions - they were solved as quickly as possible, and these articles will show my first solutions, with some minor reformatting and cleaning up.

Hands on Tutorial