Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Tools

The Power of pg_dump

Published 2024-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Haas talks up pg_dump:

I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago entitled Is pg_dump a Backup Tool?. In that post, I argued in the affirmative, but also said that it’s probably shouldn’t be your primary backup mechanism. For that, you probably shouldn’t directly use anything that is included in PostgreSQL itself, but rather a well-maintained third-party backup tool such as barman or pgbackrest. But today, I want to talk a little more about why I believe that pg_dump is both amazingly useful for solving all kinds of PostgreSQL-related problems and also just a great piece of technology.

The core value proposition of pg_dump is that the output is human-readable text. You’ll get DDL commands that you can use to recreate your database objects, and you’ll get COPY commands (or INSERTs, if you so request) that you can use to reload your table data. That is not really an advantage if you’re just trying to back up and restore an entire database cluster, because converting all of your data from PostgreSQL’s internal formats into text and back again is going to use a bunch of CPU resources. If you instead take and restore a physical backup, you can avoid all of that overhead.

Read on for scenarios in which pg_dump can be quite useful.

Comments closed

Variable Types in Postman

Published 2024-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Huyen Maithi talks variables:

Variables enable you to store and reuse values. Postman is a powerful API development tool that offers a feature known as environment variables. These variables help you work efficiently, collaborate with teammates in testing and development by allowing users to easily manage dynamic values across requests.

Click through for an overview of the types of variables you can create for Postman requests.

Comments closed

Working with Parquet Files in Postgres

Published 2024-10-18 by Kevin Feasel

Craig Kerstiens announces an extension:

Today, we’re excited to release pg_parquet – an open source Postgres extension for working with Parquet files. The extension reads and writes parquet files to local disk or to S3 natively from Postgres. With pg_parquet you’re able to:

  • Export tables or queries from Postgres to Parquet files
  • Ingest data from Parquet files to Postgres
  • Inspect the schema and metadata of existing Parquet files

Code is available at: https://github.com/CrunchyData/pg_parquet/.

Read on for more background on why we built pg_parquet or jump below to get a walkthrough of working with it.

Hey, that’s my job to tell people to read on to learn more!

Comments closed

Building a Data Detective Toolkit

Published 2024-10-09 by Kevin Feasel

Deb Melkin talks tools:

Happy T-SQL Tuesday! I wasn’t really sure I’d be able to crank something out for this one but somehow I managed to squeeze it in. Tim Mitchell ( b ) is hosting and he has a great topic for us: What’s in our Data Detective toolkit?

I love this topic for so many reasons. Partly because I feel like I’m asked to look at so many projects where I’m dropped in and asked to figure things out, usually performance related but occasionally new functionality or features. But as I’m asked to do this fairly often, I may have to see if Data Detective can be my new title… hmm…

Being a Data Detective in a film noir. On the one hand, that sounds like a really neat idea. On the other hand, things usually don’t turn out so well for the detective.

Comments closed

Creating Profiles in Visual Studio Code and Azure Data Studio

Published 2024-09-18 by Kevin Feasel

I have a new video:

In this video, I show off a not-so-well-known capability in Visual Studio Code and Azure Data Studio: creating profiles.

Profiles are very useful in Visual Studio Code, though probably less useful for Azure Data Studio. I think the primary benefit to that would be handling things like zoom levels and menu layouts when you switch from a laptop on the go to something plugged into a larger monitor.

Comments closed

Building a Test Data Generator for PostgreSQL

Published 2024-09-11 by Kevin Feasel

Mika Sutinen builds some data:

I recently had a project where I needed quickly to generate some realistic looking test data to PostgreSQL database. While I often like to go for ready-made solutions, this felt like a good opportunity to stretch my coding muscles and develop it myself. Moreover, this seemed like a fun puzzle to solve, and I could probably use the same solution later on elsewhere.

Click through for a description of the generator, as well as a link to Mika’s GitHub repo. Taking a quick peek at it, it does appear that you could probably use this for other data platforms like SQL Server with very limited modification.

Comments closed

mssql-tools 18 and Two Common Errors

Published 2024-09-10 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea covers a pair of errors you might run into with mssql-tools version 18:

In this post I cover the 0A000086 and “command not found” errors that you might encounter with the new version of SQL Server command-line tools, namely sqlcmd and bcp, for Linux.

While the latest version of SQL Server command-line tools, based on Microsoft ODBC 18, brings improvements, it also brings some gotchas that can break your automations.

Read on to learn more about each.

Comments closed

Missing Columns in the Extended Events Live Data Explorer

Published 2024-09-04 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey explains a UI oddity:

Let me be extremely clear up front, this is not my original work. I saw this post on DBA.StackExchange.com and I wanted to share and promote it. Nice work FevziKartal.

The rest of this post is just me replicating work already done by others. I just want to see it in action.

Read on for the example and what happens when you don’t have any events in the live data explorer.

Comments closed