Experienced PostgreSQL users and developers rattle off the terms “MVCC” and “VACUUM” as if everyone should know what they are and how they work, but in fact many people don’t. This blog post is my attempt to explain what MVCC is and why PostgreSQL uses it, what VACUUM is and how it works, and why we need VACUUM to implement MVCC. In addition, I’ll include a few useful links for further reading for those who may want to know more.
Setting up psql, the PostgreSQL CLI
PostgreSQL ships with an interactive console with the command line tool named psql. It can be used both for scripting and interactive usage and is moreover quite a powerful tool. Interactive features includes autocompletion, readline support (history searches, modern keyboard movements, etc), input and output redirection, formatted output, and more.
In preparation for CSS Grid shipping in browsers in March 2017, I worked on a number of guides and reference materials for the CSS Grid specification, which were published on MDN. With that material updated, we thought it would be nice to complete the documentation with similar guides for Flexbox, and so I updated the existing material to reflect the core use cases of Flexbox.
pgBackRest (http://pgbackrest.org/) aims to be a simple, reliable backup and restore system that can seamlessly scale up to the largest databases and workloads.
Instead of relying on traditional backup tools like tar and rsync, pgBackRest implements all backup features internally and uses a custom protocol for communicating with remote systems. Removing reliance on tar and rsync allows for better solutions to database-specific backup challenges. The custom remote protocol allows for more flexibility and limits the types of connections that are required to perform a backup which increases security.