Press "Enter" to skip to content

Month: February 2024

UUIDs in Postgres

Published 2024-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Lambert is not a fan:

This month’s PgSQLPhriday #015 topic is about UUIDs. Lætitia Avrot is this month’s host, see her post for the full challenge text. The topic is described as a debate between the Database People and Developers. I’m not sure there’s such a clean divide on people’s opinions on the topic, as I know plenty of Database People that have settled on using UUIDs as their default. Similarly, I know even more developer types that have followed the arguably more conventional choice of using an auto-incrementing ID.

Click through for the debate. Most of this is similar to the argument on the SQL Server side, though without the specter of clustered indexes added to the mix.

Comments closed

Basic Git for the DBA

Published 2024-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones provides a primer on Git:

One of the really interesting things over the last decade is both the rise of Git as the main VCS system for most projects, and the number of people who know nothing about it. Many of the latter seem intimidated, which is both interesting and strange to me. I usually think of technologies as ready to experiment, but I find more and more they only experiment in narrow boundaries.

This post outlines a quick way to get started with Git.

Click through to learn more.

Comments closed

Using Feature Flags with Data Projects

Published 2024-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Johnston builds out feature flags:

My motivation for writing this summary was an interaction with a project owner that didn’t understand why we couldn’t use feature flags directly in Power BI to control the user interface. This was different from our other deployments, so it took a few rounds of explanations to convince them that our use case didn’t support feature flags. It’s an oversimplification to say they can’t be used in data projects. They can be used in Power BI and other reporting tools, but the implementation is different from coding languages and their usage is limited in comparison. Feature flags can also be used in ETL tools, data engines, ETL tools, and other data tools, but with some caveats. Sometimes those caveats are severe enough that you will want to carefully consider how you use feature flags in your data projects.

Read the whole thing. The way Ben lays things out reminds me of why I historically haven’t been the biggest fan of feature flags, though they can be quite useful for application development purposes.

Comments closed