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This Week in PostgreSQL – May 31

Since last October I’ve been periodically writing up summaries of interesting content I see on the internet related to PostgreSQL (generally blog posts). My original motivation was just to learn more about PostgreSQL – but I’ve started sharing them with a few colleagues and received positive feedback.  Thought I’d try posting one of these digests here on the Ardent blog – who knows, maybe a few old readers will find it interesting? Here’s the update that I put together last week – let me know what you think!

Hello from California!

Part of my team is here in Palo Alto and I’m visiting for a few days this week. You know… for all the remote work I’ve done over the years, I still really value this in-person, face-to-face time. These little trips from Seattle to other locations where my teammates physically sit are important to me.

This is also part of the reason I enjoy user groups and conferences so much. They’re opportunities to meet with other PostgreSQL users in real life. In fact – at this very moment – one of the most important PostgreSQL conferences in the world is happening: PgCon! Having attended a few other conferences over the past year, I’m holding down the fort in the office this week in order to send a bunch of other teammates… but you can be sure I’m keeping an eye on twitter. :)

https://www.pgcon.org/2018/
https://twitter.com/search?l=&q=pgcon%20OR%20pgcon_org

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In the meantime, lets get busy with the latest updates from the postgresql virtual world. First of all, I think the biggest headline is that (just in time for pgcon) we have the first official beta version of PostgreSQL 11! The release announcement headlines with major partitioning enhancements, more parallelism, a feature to speed up SQL execution by compiling certain operations on-demand into native machine code (JIT/Just-In-Time compilation), and numerous SQL enhancements. You can also read the first draft of the release notes. This is the time to start testing and give feedback to the development community!

https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1855/
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/release-11.html

Closely related to this, there’s one other really big headline that I’m excited about: the new AWS RDS Preview Environment. You can now try out the new pg11 features ahead of time with a single click! In part because the development community is so awesome, the first database available in the RDS Preview Environment is PostgreSQL. And the official PostgreSQL 11 beta release is _already_ available on RDS!! Personally I’m hoping that this benefits the community by getting more people to test and give feedback on new features being built for PostgreSQL 11. I hope it will make a great database even better.

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/databasepreview/
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=5788 (pg11 beta announcement)

Outside of the RDS and PG11-related stuff, I saw one other headline that I thought might be worth mentioning. On May 29, IBM published a blog post that caught my attention, featuring EnterpriseDB as an IBM partner on their Private Cloud deployments. You might not realize just how much PostgreSQL is being used and sold by IBM… but there’s Compose, ElephantSQL, and now EDB in the mix.

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/think/2018/05/next-enterprise-platform/

Part of the reason I took note of this was that I remember just last November when HPE ran a similar announcement, partnering with EDB on their on-premise subscription-based GreenLake platform.

https://news.hpe.com/hpe-expands-pay-per-use-it-to-key-business-workloads/

So it seems to me that EDB is doing some nice work at building up the PostgreSQL presence in the enterprise world – which I’m very happy to see. To be clear, this isn’t necessarily new… does anyone remember vPostgres?

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/03/getting-comfortable-with-vpostgres-and-the-vcenter-server-appliance-part-1.html

Nonetheless, it feels to me like the ball is moving forward. It feels like PostgreSQL maturity and adoption are continually progressing at a very healthy pace.

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Moving on from headlines, lets get to the real stuff – the meaty technical articles. :)
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