Staying Current

It is important to stay current with the technologies you use on a daily basis. This is especially true of the ones you use at work. As I am a database guy that works mostly in PostgreSQL, I make sure that the PostgreSQL website is always present in one of my browser tabs. I also make sure to read all of the entries from Planet PostgreSQL.

Normally I can just skim over the postings. Today was different. There was a great story from Josh Berkus about racing to create a database with a billion tables. While that would be a database administrator's nightmare, it was interesting to see the results. Josh didn't succeed in getting to a billion tables as the machine crashed before then due to operating system limitations. It did make it to the 4 million table mark. I would be interested to see how many tables could be created on a system with fewer limits, but would have to slash my wrists if I ever got put in charge of a database with over a million tables.

The second interesting posting of the day was from Robert Haas at EnterpriseDB. While I used to work at EDB, Robert came after I left and so I don't know him other than from his blog. He talked about some of the performance optimizations the PostgreSQL developers are thinking of adding to version 9.2. I have to say I am impressed if they actually are able to make them work. Some of the projects for which I am responsible, require extreme database speed. Anything the developers can do to make it faster, make me happy.

Not everyone is a big fan of databases and so I don't suggest that you immediately go out and read up on PostgreSQL. However I can recommend that you find quality websites relating to the technology you use at your job and read them daily. It doesn't take much time and will help you keep on top of any new features that you might just need.