Registration for PGCon 2013 is now open. Have a look at our list of speakers. Please be sure to book your accommodation right away. Some hotels will be sold out within a few weeks. We have an accommodation page which will help you find somewhere to stay.

PGDay NYC 2013 will be held on Friday, March 22, 2013 at the ACE Hotel in New York City. PGDay NYC is an intensive one-day PostgreSQL symposium with technical sessions focusing on the core topics you need to succeed with PostgreSQL. It will cover topics for users, developers and contributors to PostgreSQL.

For more information, please see http://pgday.nycpug.org

Database .NET is an innovative, powerful and intuitive multiple database management tool, you can Browse objects, Design tables, Edit rows, Export data and run Queries with a consistent interface.

This is a major version release and contains a lot of new features and improvements:

• Added Script all database objects
• Added Form Editor
• Added Form Viewer
• Added Quick Button
• Added DateTime Picker
• Added New export formats: .json/.xlsx
• Improved Data Editor and Cell Editor
• Improved Table Editor
• Improved Database Diagram
• Improved SQL Profiler
• Improved Code Manager
• Improved AutoComplete and IntelliSense
• … and much more.

Free, Portable, All-In-One, Easy to Use and Multlanguage.

More Info: http://fishcodelib.com/Database.htm

Datanamic has released a new version of Datanamic DataDiff for PostgreSQL. Datanamic DataDiff allows the user to compare the data in two databases, view the differences, automatically generate safe data change scripts or apply the changes to the destination database directly.

Version 4 is almost completely re-designed with a new modern user interface, an improved comparison engine and new comparison options. Three (3) editions support PostgreSQL: the MultiDB edition, the PostgreSQL edition and the CrossDB edition. The CrossDB edition allows you to synchronize data between different database platforms (including PostgreSQL).

More information can be found on the Datanamic DataDiff for PostgreSQL product pages.

The San Francisco PostgreSQL User Group will be hosting a full-day PostgreSQL event on the first day of PyCon, March 13, at the Santa Clara Convention Center. This event will include at sessions from PostgreSQL and Python gurus, and will be open to the public as well as PyCon attendees.

DALIBO is proud to announce the release of pgBadger v3, the new PostgreSQL log analyzer. pgBadger is built for speed with fully detailed reports from your PostgreSQL log file.

This new release brings significant improvements. All pgBadger users should upgrade as soon as possible.

pgBadger 3 parallel log parsing

The first versions of pgBadger were bound to only one CPU. The PostgreSQL log files were scanned sequentially. Analyzing very large log files could take several hours.

This limitation is now removed. You can use as many CPU cores as you want and scan your logs in parallel.

To enable parallel processing, you just have to use the -j N option, N being the number of cores you want to use.

Please note that the parallel mode has a little drawback. With this method, some queries may be truncated. If you enable N cores, then result may differ in a maximum of N queries per log file.

However, this is a minor issue: parallel mode is interesting if you have millions of queries to analyze. And if you have millions of queries in a log file, you can afford to loose a few as it's quite unlikely that the lost queries would have changed the overall results.

However, to avoid this problem, you can use the pgBadger "per-file parallel mode" to analyze your logs but with lower performance than the standard parallel mode. To enable this behaviour, you have to use the "-J N" option instead of "-j N". In per-file mode, the performances start being really interesting when there's hundreds of small log files (e.g. 10MB rotation size limit) and with at least 8 cores.

How fast is pgBadger 3?

The goal was to allow pgBadger to use as many cores as specified to have parallel log parsing. Here are some performance results using pgbadger on five log files for a total of 9.5 GB:

• with 1 core => 1h 41m 18s
• with 2 cores => 50m 25s
• with 4 cores => 25m 39s
• with 8 cores => 15m 58s

We feel this performance gain is quite interesting :)

New binary format

In addition to the classic HTML, TXT and Tsung output formats, pgBadger 3 is now able to generate a binary input/output format. This new format is useful if you only want to store the log statistics and generate the HTML report with graph later.

In a nutshell, the two main activities of pgBadger are parsing and reporting. With this binary format, you can now split those activities and run them at different times. For exemple, you can parse your log once a day, and generate the HTML reports only when needed.

You can also combine several binary files to . For Instance, you may create a binary report every week and aggregate the last 4 week reports to build a monthly report in HTML.

This new binary format is also compatible with other tools such as pgShark https://github.com/dalibo/pgshark/.

More stats, more pie charts!

This major release also has additional features:

• New pie graph to show number of autovacuum per table and number of tuples removed by autovacuum per table
• No more distinction between log_duration, log_statement and log_min_duration_statement format
• New report of tuples/pages removed in report of VACUUM by table
• New VACUUM and ANALYZE hourly reports and graphs

... and many bugfixes .

For the complete list of changes, please checkout the release note on https://github.com/dalibo/pgbadger/blob/master/ChangeLog

Deprecated options

WARNING : for the sake of simplicity, the ''--enable-log_min_duration'' and ''--enable-log_duration'' command line options have been removed. pgbadger is now parsing any log_duration, log_statement and log_min_duration_statement lines without distinction and adapt the reports following those lines.

If you are running pgBadger using cron, please take care: if one of theses options appears in the command line, pgbadger will refuse to start.

Links & Credits

DALIBO would like to thank the developers who submitted patches and the users who reported bugs and feature requests, especially Matt Romaine, Luke Cyca, Kevin Brannen, Adam Schroder, pilat66, Euler Taveira de Oliveira, stuntmunkee, pierrestroh, Vipul, Dirk-Jan Bulsink and Vincent Laborie.

pgBadger is an open project. Any contribution to build a better tool is welcome. You just have to send your ideas, features requests or patches using the GitHub tools or directly on our mailing list.

Links :

• Download
• Mailing List

About pgBadger :

pgBagder is a new generation log analyzer for PostgreSQL, created by Gilles Darold, also author of ora2pg migration tool. pgBadger is a fast and easy tool to analyze your SQL traffic and create HTML5 reports with dynamics graphs. pgBadger is the perfect tool to understand the behavior of your PostgreSQL server and identify which SQL queries need to be optimized.

Docs, Download & Demo at http://dalibo.github.com/pgbadger/

About DALIBO :

DALIBO is the leading PostgreSQL company in France, providing support, trainings and consulting to its customers since 2005. The company contributes to the PostgreSQL community in various ways, including : code, articles, translations, free conferences and workshops

Check out DALIBO's open source projects at http://dalibo.github.com

ConFoo is one of the most important conferences for web developers with its 100 international speakers. During 3 days, our 160 presentations will cover languages, databases, security and more. Watch out video.

Meeting of people around PostgreSQL within Developer Conference 2013.

The PyPgDay committee has selected the speakers and talks for PyPgDay 2013. We have an awesome program for you, including talks about monitoring, scaling, performance, Python application development, Django and mobile applications, and speakers from Disqus, Apsalar, VMware, 2ndQuadrant and Uber. While we can't give you everything you want to know about PostgreSQL and Python in one day, we can certainly give you a lot.

You also want to register soon, because registration is already 50% full.

Check out the list of speakers on the draft schedule. We may reorder them from here, but the talks and speakers are pretty solid. We still have room for some lightning talks.

PyPgDay is presented by Disqus.

The PyPgDay Party Sponsor is Salesforce.com. The Wifi Sponsor is Heroku.com. PyPgDay is sponsored by Urban Mapping, Uber.com, TransLattice, PostgreSQL Experts, Pandora.com, File-Away.UK and Apsalar.

PGDay Southern California organized by the LA and San Diego Postgres Users' Groups, and hosted by SCALE11X.

The ultimate database test data generation tool for PostgreSQL is better than ever.

Version 5 of Datanamic Data Generator for PostgreSQL has been redesigned. The tool has a complete new user interface. The new version generates test data faster and generates better sample data, has a new "test run" option and has new generator settings such as the "synchronized selection" option for generators which get data from external sources. Test data generation for MS SQL Server 2012 and SQLite (version 3) databases is supported now also.

This is not all. There is more. A complete list of changes can be found at on our website at:

Datanamic Data Generator for PostgreSQL product page.

SQL Maestro Group announces the release of AnySQL Maestro 13.2, a powerful tool for managing any database engine accessible via ODBC driver or OLE DB provider (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, Access, etc).

The new version is immediately available at
http://www.sqlmaestro.com/products/anysql/maestro/.

AnySQL Maestro comes in both Freeware and Professional editions.

Top 10 new features:

1. The software has been optimized to work with some popular DBMS including PostgreSQL.
2. Updated Connection String Reference.
3. Enhanced Get SQL Dump wizard.
4. New Start Page with quick access to recently connected databases and latest company news.
5. Improved SQL Editor.
6. Highlighted key and required columns and multi-column lookup editors in the data grids.
7. Data import from CSV files containing multi-line strings.
8. Data Export: support for custom separators.
9. Colored profiles in Database Explorer.
10. New modern progress windows.

There are also some other useful things. Full press release is available at the SQL Maestro Group website.

Today, the Precog team has released a free implementation of Precog for PostgreSQL. Precog for PostgreSQL empowers users to easily perform data science on PostgreSQL.

This release bundles the core Precog analysis technology into a completely free package that anyone can download and deploy on their existing PostgreSQL database. Precog for PostgreSQL gives you the ability to analyze all the data in your PostgreSQL database, without forcing you to export data into another tool or write any custom code.

Precog for PostgreSQL comes bundled with Labcoat, a high-level analysis tool that lets users analyze data using Quirrel, the statistically-oriented query language. To get started, visit this page to download the zipped file (includes JAR, scripts and config file).

To get started….

1. Download the zip file
2. Configure Precog
3. Launch Precog
4. Try the API
5. Try Labcoat
6. Analyze your data!

See the read me for the complete installation and configuration instructions. We provide full support for this release so if you run into any trouble, please contact the Precog team at support@precog.com.

Have fun analyzing your data on your PostgreSQL database and let us know what you think!

2ndQuadrant is proud to announce the release of version 1.2.0 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL.

This major release introduces automated support for retention policies based on redundancy of periodical backups or recovery window.

Retention policies are integrated by a safety mechanism that allows administrators to specify a minimum number of periodical backups that must exist at any time for a server.

For a complete list of changes, see the "Release Notes" section below.

Backup retention policies

A backup retention policy is an user-defined policy that determines how long backups and related archive logs (Write Ahead Log segments in PostgreSQL) need to be retained for recovery procedures.

Through the 'retention_policy' configuration option, Barman retains the periodical backups required to satisfy the current retention policy, and any archived WAL files required for the complete recovery of those backups.

Barman users can define a retention policy in terms of backup redundancy (how many periodical backups, e.g. 5) or a recovery window (how long, e.g. 3 months).

Minimum redundancy safety --

Through the 'minimum_redundancy' configuration option, Barman controls the minimum number of backups available at any time in the catalogue for a specific server. This feature will protect users from accidental delete operations.

Links --

• Website
• Download
• Documentation
• Support

Sponsors --

The open-source development of retention policies under GPL has been sponsored by a large European company that opted to remain anonymous.

Release Notes --

• Added the "retention_policy_mode" global/server option which defines the method for enforcing retention policies (currently only "auto")
• Added the "minimum_redundancy" global/server option which defines the minimum number of backups to be kept for a server
• Added the "retention_policy" global/server option which defines retention policies management based on redunancy (e.g. REDUNDANCY 4) or recovery window (e.g. RECOVERY WINDOW OF 3 MONTHS)
• Added retention policy support to the logging infrastructure, the "check" and the "status" commands
• The "check" command now integrates minimum redundancy control
• Added retention policy states (valid, obsolete and potentially obsolete) to "show-backup" and "list-backup" commands
• The 'all' keyword is now forbidden as server name
• Added basic support for Nagios plugin output to the 'check' command through the --nagios option
• Barman now requires argh => 0.21.2 and argcomplete
• Minor bug fixes

About Barman --

Barman (Backup and Recovery Manager) is an open-source administration tool for disaster recovery of PostgreSQL servers written in Python. It allows your organisation to perform remote backups of multiple servers in business critical environments and help DBAs during the recovery phase. Barman most wanted features include backup catalogues, retention policies, remote recovery, archiving and compression of WAL files and backups.

Built on top of PostgreSQL's robust and reliable Point-In-Time-Recovery technology, Barman allows database administrators to manage the backup and recovery phases of several PostgreSQL database servers from a centralised location, using an intuitive command interface. Barman is distributed under GNU GPL 3.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released a security update to all current versions of the PostgreSQL database system, including versions 9.2.3, 9.1.8, 9.0.12, 8.4.16, and 8.3.23. This update fixes a denial-of-service (DOS) vulnerability. All users should update their PostgreSQL installations as soon as possible.

The security issue fixed in this release, CVE-2013-0255, allows a previously authenticated user to crash the server by calling an internal function with invalid arguments. This issue was discovered by independent security researcher Sumit Soni this week and reported via Secunia SVCRP, and we are grateful for their efforts in making PostgreSQL more secure.

Today's update also fixes a performance regression which caused a decrease in throughput when using dynamic queries in stored procedures in version 9.2. Applications which use PL/pgSQL's EXECUTE are strongly affected by this regression and should be updated. Additionally, we have fixed intermittent crashes caused by CREATE/DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY, and multiple minor issues with replication.

This release is expected to be the final update for version 8.3, which is now End-of-Life (EOL). Users of version 8.3 should plan to upgrade to a later version of PostgreSQL immediately. For more information, see our Versioning Policy.

This update release also contains fixes for many minor issues discovered and patched by the PostgreSQL community in the last two months, including:

• Prevent unnecessary table scans during vacuuming
• Prevent spurious cached plan error in PL/pgSQL
• Allow sub-SELECTs to be subscripted
• Prevent DROP OWNED from dropping databases or tablespaces
• Make ECPG use translated messages
• Allow PL/Python to use multi-table trigger functions (again) in 9.1 and 9.2
• Fix several activity log management issues on Windows
• Prevent autovacuum file truncation from being cancelled by deadlock_timeout
• Make extensions build with the .exe suffix automatically on Windows
• Fix concurrency issues with CREATE/DROP DATABASE
• Reject out-of-range values in to_date() conversion function
• Revert cost estimation for large indexes back to pre-9.2 behavior
• Make pg_basebackup tolerate timeline switches
• Cleanup leftover temp table entries during crash recovery
• Prevent infinite loop when COPY inserts a large tuple into a table with a large fillfactor
• Prevent integer overflow in dynahash creation
• Make pg_upgrade work with INVALID indexes
• Fix bugs in TYPE privileges
• Allow Contrib installchecks to run in their own databases
• Many documentation updates
• Add new timezone "FET".

As with other minor releases, users are not required to dump and reload their database or use pg_upgrade in order to apply this update release; you may simply shut down PostgreSQL and update its binaries. Users who have skipped multiple update releases may need to perform additional, post-update steps; see the Release Notes for details.

Links:

• Download
• Release Notes

The first PostgreSQL Day in Australia (PGDay AU 2013) will be held on Monday, Feb 04, 2013 in Melbourne, Victoria.

PostgreSQL Europe will host a a separate PGDay as well as a developer room during FOSDEM 2013.