#351 — April 15, 2020

Read on the Web

Postgres Weekly

A Detailed Look at pg_show_plans — A few issues ago we linked to a basic introduction to pg_show_plans – this goes a little further. pg_show_plans lets you look at the execution plans of slow queries in real time as they’re being executed which can help you when troubleshooting.

Kaarel Moppel

Intersecting GPS Tracks to Identify Infected Individuals — I’m not a huge fan of COVID-19 related content, but this is a pretty interesting technique with numerous use cases. Essentially it uses PostGIS to identify overlapping paths.

Florian Nadler

Online Training: Learn PostgreSQL from Home — The remote PostgreSQL Database Administration training course is available at a discounted rate & will be conducted in two different timezones. The course covers day-to-day DBA operations, monitoring, server configurations, and more.

2ndQuadrant PostgreSQL Training sponsor

PostgreSQL's 'Related Projects' — Thanks to Andreas Scherbaum for pointing out a new page on the Postgres site dedicated to projects related to Postgres like the code that runs the Postgres web site, mailing list, build farm, package management system, etc.

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

Authentication Configuration in Postgres (and CockroachDB) — In Postgres, client authentication can be controlled via a ‘HBA’ (host-based authentication) file. It’s not something we see covered very often, so you might find this interesting, particularly as it compares things against CockroachDB.

Raphael ‘kena’ Poss

▶  Easy And Correct High Availability Postgres with Kubernetes — A 50 minute talk from PostgresOpen 2019 that goes all the way ‘from containers up’ until actually doing stuff with Postgres.

Steven Pousty

How To Set Up an Express API Backend Project With Postgres — A pretty extensive walkthrough of creating an HTTP API using Express with Node.js and Postgres on the backend, then deploying it all on Heroku.

Chidi Orji

A Beginners Guide to Basic Indexing in Postgres

James Bannister

eBook: The Most Important Events to Monitor in Your Postgres Logs — In this eBook, we are looking at the Top 6 Postgres log events for monitoring query performance and preventing downtime.

pganalyze sponsor

Documenting the Citus Extension to Postgres: An Interview with Joe Nelson — Joe, a.k.a. begriffs, talks about why he works on documentation, why the multi-tenant and real-time analytics tutorials matter, the INSERT..SELECT with repartitioning feature, and what development platform Citus uses for docs.

Citus Data (Microsoft)

Procedural vs Query Approaches for Finding Packages — Explorations of a query that can be used to display which packages are available for a given FreeBSD port. Get your head around the data model and the ideas here apply to all sorts of situations.

Dan Langille

???? Seen on Twitter

Saw this tweet and thought it was a pretty neat reminder of the sorts of things we can do with Postgres. Justin kindly let us include it:

Click through to the original tweet if you want to see the code better. Neat use for a generated column!

#353 — April 29, 2020

Read on the Web

Postgres Weekly

7 Things That Could Be Improved in Postgres — As 1990s dance pop group D:Ream sang in 1994, Things Can Only Get Better.. including Postgres ???? Luckily these are all ‘nice to have’s but I dare say we’ll see some of them (such as automatic tuning and auto-vacuuming improvements) appear over time.

Kaarel Moppel

How The Citus Distributed Query Executor Adapts to a Postgres Workload — Citus is the popular extension for horizontally scaling Postgres and its query executor has seen some huge updates lately.

Citus Data (Microsoft)

eBook: The Most Important Events to Monitor in Your Postgres Logs — In this pganalyze eBook, we are looking at the Top 6 Postgres log events for monitoring query performance and preventing downtime.

pganalyze sponsor

Swarm64 DA 4.0: A Database Acceleration Extension for Postgres — Swarm64 started life as a FPGA-driven way to accelerate Postgres performance, but can now work without FPGAs too. This is not a free product but if you want to give it a run, there’s a trial or it can be spun up from the AWS Marketplace.

Yana Krasteva

Postgres Performance Goalposts — An interesting heuristic from Bruce here on what to do if you expect your connections, queries, or write queries to be above/below certain levels.

Bruce Momjian

A Tale of Password Authentication Methods in Postgres — “Let’s say you want to implement a password authentication method in a client/server protocol..” Here’s the story of how Postgres came up with its approaches.

Peter Eisentraut

How to Set application_name When Using psql — As Craig says: “Setting your application name in Postgres is SO USEFUL. It will help a lot for debugging when you’ve got multiple different apps/services connecting to the same database.”

Denish Patel

How to Upgrade Postgres from v11 to v12 on Ubuntu 20.04 — Now that Ubuntu 20.04 is out, this might be on your mind!

Paolo Melchiorre

Working with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL: What Happened to the Stats? — Apparently there’s a bug with numerous versions of Aurora PostgreSQL that causes certain stats to be lost on restart.

Michael Vitale

Postgres Vision 2020 - Free Online Conference (June 23-24) — Learn how today’s IT leaders are using Postgres. Join from anywhere in the world and listen from 30+ Postgres experts.

EnterpriseDB sponsor

A Deep Dive into PostGIS Nearest Neighbor Search — Take a deep dive into the Postgres and PostGIS internals to find out how K-nearest neighbor accelerates local search.

Martin Davis

My Favorite Postgres Extensions: Part One — A basic high level look at pg_partman and postgres_fdw.

Nawaz Ahmed

Kanel: Generate TypeScript Types from Postgres

Kristian Dupont

Postgres.app: The Easiest Way to Get Started with Postgres on the Mac — I’ve used this for years, it’s super popular, but if there’s just a handful of developers out there who’d benefit from it and don’t know about it, this reminder will be worth it :-) It continues to get very frequent updates.

Jakob Egger, Chris Pastl, and Mattt Thompson

#335 — April 23, 2020

Read on the Web

Node Weekly

Node.js 14 Released — Woo-hoo another major release of Node.js is here. v14 now becomes the current ‘release’ line with it becoming a LTS (Long Term Support) release in October.. so production apps would, ideally, remain on v12 for now. So what’s new..?

• Diagnostic reports are now a stable feature.
• It's based on V8 8.1.
• An experimental Async Local Storage API
• Improvements to streams.
• An experimental WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) to support future WebAssembly use cases.
• Bye bye to the ESM module ‘experimental’ warning (though it still is experimental).

Michael Dawson and Bethany Griggs

Learn Hardcore Functional Programming in JavaScript — Join Brian Lonsdorf and learn how to apply such concepts as pure functions, currying, composition, functors, monads and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Puppeteer 3.0: Say Hello to Firefox — Best known as a way to headlessly control Chrome from Node, Puppeteer has recently seen some competition in the form of the cross-browser Playwright recently. But competition can be good and Puppeteer now supports Firefox too.

Mathias Bynens

ZEIT Is Now Vercel — You probably best know ZEIT as the creators and maintainers of the popular Next.js React framework and their ‘Now’ deployment and hosting platform.

Vercel

New OpenSSL Security Release To Require Node Updates? Maybe Not.. — A key security update to OpenSSL raised the possibility of widespread Node releases to incorporate the fixes, but initial suggestions are that Node isn’t affected. Fingers crossed!

Sam Roberts

???? Jobs

Node.js Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands.

X-Team

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

???? Articles & Tutorials

OneTesselAway: Building a Real-Time Public Transit Status Device — A developer wanted to know when the next bus would arrive.. while using lots of cool tech, including Node, the OneBusAway API, and the Tessel 2 IoT platform.

Robert McGuire

What is the toJSON() Function? — If an object has a toJSON function, JSON.stringify() calls toJSON() and serializes the return value from toJSON() instead.

Valeri Karpov

Top GitHub Best Practices for Developers - Expanded Guide — Implementing these best practices could save you time, improve code maintainability, and prevent security risks.

Datree.io sponsor

Refactor Your Node and Express APIs to Serverless with Azure Functions — John Papa points out a Microsoft tutorial that walks through the process of taking a Node API serverless with Azure’s Functions service.

John Papa

Querying SQL Server from Node with async/await

Rob Tomlin

Why I Stopped Using Microservices

Robin Wieruch

???? Tools, Resources and Libraries

lazynpm: A Terminal UI for npm — One of those sort of things you don’t realize you need until you give it a go. There’s a four-minute screencast if you want to see how it works without downloading.

Jesse Duffield

node-sqlite3 4.2: Async, Non-blocking SQLite3 Bindings for Node — 4.2.0 just came out.

Mapbox

ts-gphoto2-driver: A Node Wrapper for libgphoto2 — libgphoto2 provides a way to control a variety of digital cameras/DSLRs.

Lenzotti Romain

AppSignal Now Supports Node.js: Roadmap for the Coming Weeks

AppSignal sponsor

Rosetta: A General Purpose Internationalization Library in 292 Bytes — Less than 300 bytes, but does have a few dependencies. Aims to be very simple and is targeted at basic string use cases.

Luke Edwards

nodejs-dns 2.0: The Google Cloud DNS Client for Node

Google

node-osc 5.0: Open Sound Control Protocol Library — OSC is a protocol used to communicate between media devices.

Myles Borins

ts-node: TypeScript Execution and REPL for Node

TypeStrong

???? And One for Fun..

npm trends: Compare NPM Package Downloads — A site to compare package download counts over time. For example, what about koa vs restify vs fastify?

John Potter