Quotes of the week

Some human endeavors require a disguise. Sometimes the intent is to deceive, but more often, the intent is to communicate something true at a deeper level. For instance, many job interviewers expect you to dress up in a tie to indicate that you're seriously interested in fitting in, even though both of you know you'll never wear a tie on the job. It's odd when you think about it: tying a piece of cloth around your neck can magically get you a job. In Perl culture, the tie operator plays a similar role: it lets you create a seemingly normal variable that, behind the disguise, is actually a full-fledged Perl object that is expected to have an interesting personality of its own. It's just an odd bit of magic, like pulling Bugs Bunny out of a hat.

Postgres 9.2 is going to have a boat-load of performance enhancements. The inclusion in Postgres 9.2 of index-only scans and count(*) optimizations clearly is something that is going to help a lot of work-loads.

Large server workloads (+32 cores) is another area that is being addressed. This has been an area where we lagged behind commercial databases, and I was starting to think that to catch up with them, we were going to need to do a lot of very ugly, platform-specific hacks. Well, that turns out to be false also. Changing the layout of the of the per-session shared memory storage has yielded a 40% performance improvement on 32-core tests. Lock scalability for a large number of clients was also improved by 5 times!