Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Wrong prediction of the day

"There is this fear people have that eventually actors are going to be replaced by computer characters. I don't think it is valid at all. The only thing that the technology is going to do is provide the actors with new places to go and new ways to go there."

- Steven Lisberger, 1982, BYTE Magazine, Vol. 07, #11, p. 74

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Using PostgreSQL to get things done: 1. Installation

Currently I'm doing a short series of videos about data analysis PostgreSQL. Since this is for people who usually do not directly deal with databases every day, it starts very basic with the installation on Linux and Windows.


What do you think, is it worth the effort?

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Windows, keep your dirty fingers off my files!

I spent the better part of the morning figuring out why a colleague could not import a PostgreSQL dump in plain format made on Linux on his Windows machine.

According to documentation, this works like so (OS agnostic):

psql dbname < infile

However, this  gave the following error:

ERROR:  missing data for ...

However, the documentation for psql gives an alternative way to read commands from a file:

The -f switch.

 "
Read commands from the file filename, rather than standard input. This option can be repeated and combined in any order with the -c option. When either -c or -f is specified, psql does not read commands from standard input; instead it terminates after processing all the -c and -f options in sequence. Except for that, this option is largely equivalent to the meta-command \i.
If filename is - (hyphen), then standard input is read until an EOF indication or \q meta-command. This can be used to intersperse interactive input with input from files. Note however that Readline is not used in this case (much as if -n had been specified).
Using this option is subtly different from writing psql < filename. In general, both will do what you expect, but using -f enables some nice features such as error messages with line numbers. There is also a slight chance that using this option will reduce the start-up overhead. On the other hand, the variant using the shell's input redirection is (in theory) guaranteed to yield exactly the same output you would have received had you entered everything by hand.
 "


What this doesn't tell you, is that on Windows, CMD.exe apparently somehow tries to interpret the file it reads. And by doing so, it destroyed data in the dump so that COPY was unable to understand it anymore. So the last sentence of the statement above is just theory on Windows.

Long story short, with psql -f all went fine - and don't use I/O redirection with psql on Windows!

Monday, February 6, 2017

Module Monday: safeupdate

A recent tweet pointed me to safeupdate which is a little extension that forbids unconditional UPDATE and DELETE statements, i.e. without WHERE clause.

Let's see how this works...

The build and install procedure is pretty non-spectacular: make, make install and then either activate it per session with load 'safeupdate' or globally by adding it to postgresql.conf:

shared_preload_libraries = 'safeupdate'

After that, if you try an unconditional UPDATE or DELETE on any table, you'll get the following errors:

ERROR:  UPDATE requires a WHERE clause

and

ERROR:  DELETE requires a WHERE clause

respectively and the operation is cancelled.

Unconditional UPDATE and DELETE can still be forced by using a condition that always evaluates to true, like

WHERE TRUE or WHERE 1=1

But now you have to explicitly request this behaviour.

I think this is ever so useful to protect against human error, that I wonder why this isn't something mandatory, even if it's non-standard.

However, there is one glitch: If you JOIN tables to UPDATE or DELETE only certain rows that match the ON condition, this is not recognized as a conditional operation and the WHERE TRUE is still needed to pacify the extension. Well, I can live with that...

Monday, January 23, 2017

A new type for PostgreSQL

CREATE TYPE trumpean AS ENUM ('true', 'alternateTrue');

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

What happened?

Deutschland
3222
Vereinigte Staaten
3127
Tschechische Republik
2918
Frankreich
66
Vereinigtes Königreich
49
Belgien
34
Polen
23
Slowakei
12
Brasilien
11
Irland
11

Germany suddenly jumped from a two-digit to a four-digit access count?

Sudden FAME! ;-)