DEV Community: Robert Treat

phpPgAdmin 7.12.1 released

Robert Treat — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 02:12:00 +0000

I’m pleased to introduce the latest release of phpPgAdmin, version 7.12.1.

This release incorporates the following changes:

Fix a number of issues related to changes in Postgres 12.
Fix an issue with truncation of long multibyte strings
Removal of broken tree branches from table/view browse option
Properly escape identifiers when browsing tables/views/schemas
Add support for granting USAGE on sequences

Note this new version now requires support for the https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.mbstring.php module in PHP.

For more information on phpPgAdmin, check out our project page at https://github.com/phppgadmin/phppgadmin/

You can download the release at: https://github.com/phppgadmin/phppgadmin/releases/tag/REL_7-12-1

Special thanks to Jean-Michel Vourgère, who supplied a number of significant patches and updates towards this release. For complete details of changes, please see the HISTORY file and/or commit logs. We hope you find this new release helpful!

5 Quick Thoughts on the State of Postgres Survey

Robert Treat — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 17:20:00 +0000

The folks at TimescaleDB have published their ”State of Postgres” survey results in a new micro-site where you can find a summary of responses, some more detailed analysis, and the source data from the survey. This survey was conducted for about 2 months during the late summer/early fall of 2019 and while I haven’t gone through all the raw data as of yet, after reading the results… well, I have some opinions. If you haven’t read it yet, go check it out, it has all the context for the rest of this post :-)

1. Join, or Die

Because the Postgres project has no single owner, the Postgres community has always been a little bit fractured and doesn’t always speak with one voice. As users, this means the community can look rather different depending on which vendors you work with, the country you live in, the tooling you use, or the online communities you interact with. Since these different groups aren’t always as coordinated as one would hope, initiatives like this can sometimes be harder to push forward, and I think this survey did suffer from that; it only made it out to about 500 people which is a pretty small subset, and you have to keep this in mind before making too large of conclusions about what you see in the data.

2. Slow and steady growth

39% of respondents have been using Postgres for less than 5 years, with 10% having started within the last 2 years. I’ve seen surveys from communities where they suddenly catch fire and 50% have used it in less than a year, and 90% less than two years (rhymes with shmocker?) and it becomes really hard for those communities to manage that, so this seems like a positive, and helps confirm that Postgres is growing at a solid pace, but not in a way that is likely to be damaging for the community.

3. You do what now?

Technical titles are hard, but with more than half of the survey respondents reporting some kind of developer-oriented job title, and 50% saying they work in software companies, it is again a good reminder that Postgres isn’t just for DBA’s, and that most peoples interactions with the software are coming from non-traditional outlets. I’ve spent some time coordinating between the Postgres Funds Group and The U.S. PostgreSQL Association this year to ensure a presence at shows like Pycon, Railsconf, and All Things Open, among others, and I hope to see this trend continue into next year.

4. About those clouds

The answers related to running Postgres on-prem vs the cloud were a bit hard to decipher. We can safely assume about 1/3 of folks are running on fully managed Postgres, but we don’t know how many of those people are also manually managing instances as well. (We do both and I expect others do the same depending on the size/scope of their deployment needs). I feel like I could make a hand-wavey argument that at least 15% of overall respondents are AWS customers, which seems like a pretty big number and will for some will probably exacerbate the rumblings that, relative to their code contributions, Amazon is not contributing their fair share. Granted that isn’t as surprising as the data on the other cloud providers; Azure/Citus didn’t even rank in the poll, which I just have to attribute to a skew based on Timescale’s reach, especially since GCP got a hefty 18%, which seems amazing considering how they have managed their Postgres offerings. (I have friends at GCP and I like the platform in general, but Postgres seems like a second class citizen the way they are currently running things)

5. Those quotes

Oy vey. I’m not sure if Timescale was picking quotes just to stir up some controversy (there are certainly more friendly ones in the raw data), but the quotes about NoSQL are a bit off-putting. This is an area where the community needs to continue improving because we have a reputation for sometimes being “stand-offish”. Not in all cases of course, but if you want to find people with strong opinions who are not afraid to speak out, the Postgres community has lots of them. (Perhaps this blog post is a case in point) Anyway, given at least 50% of respondents are using at least one NoSQL system in conjunction with Postgres; and based on modern infrastructure patterns that isn’t going to change; we need to learn to focus on helping people where they are, rather than where we think they should be, and being less abrasive about it in general.

All in all, I hope this information will be useful for the community, and I want to thank the Timescale folks for publishing the results (and the raw data), and I hope they will continue to do this and/or work within the community to expand the reach of this survey next year.

Introducing phpPgAdmin 7.12.0

Robert Treat — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 04:27:00 +0000

After an overly long development cycle, I’m pleased to introduce the latest release of phpPgAdmin, version 7.12.0.

As with many software releases, the code changes are plenty, and the release bullets are few, but they are quite important. In this release we have:

PHP 7 is now the default version for development, and the minimum version required for phpPgAdmin going forward. Most users are currently running PHP 7, so we’re happy to support this going forward, and encourage users of PHP 5.x to upgrade for continued support.
We’ve added support for all current versions of PostgreSQL, including the pending PostgreSQL 12 release. Our aim going forward will be to ensure that we are properly supporting all current release of Postgres, with degraded support for EOL versions.
We’ve updated some internal libraries, fixed additional bugs, and merged many patches that had accumulated over the years. We want to thank everyone who provided a patch, whether merged or not, and hope you will consider contributing to phpPgAdmin in the future.

This version also comes with a change to our development and release cycle process. When the project originally started, we developed and released new versions like traditional desktop software; annual-ish releases for new versions with all the new features, while providing a few periodic bugfix releases in between. While this was ok from a developers point of view, that meant users had to wait for months (and in unfortunate cases, years) between releases to get new code. As developers, we never felt that pain, because developers would just run code directly from git master. As it turns out, that is a much better experience, and as much of the software world has changed to embrace that idea, our process is going to change as well.

The first part of this is changing how we number our releases. Going forward, our versions numbers will represent:

- the primary PHP version supported (7), 
- the most recent version of PostgreSQL supported (12), 
- and the particular release number in that series (0).

Our plan is to continue developing on this branch (7_12) and releasing new features and bug fixes as often as needed. At some point about a year from now, after PostgreSQL has branched for Postgres 13/14, we’ll incorporate that into an official release, and bump our release number to 7.13.0. Presumably, in a few years, there will eventually be a release of PHP 8, and we’ll start planning that change at that time. We hope this will make it easier for both users and contributors going forward.

For more information on phpPgAdmin, check out our project page at:
https://github.com/phppgadmin/phppgadmin/

You can download the release at:
https://github.com/phppgadmin/phppgadmin/releases/tag/REL_7-12-0

Once again, I want to thank everyone who has helped contribute to phpPgAdmin over the years. The project has gone through some ups and downs, but despite that is still used by a very large number of users and it enjoys a healthy developer ecosystem. We hope you find this new release helpful!

Charm City Postgres

Robert Treat — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 18:17:00 +0000

This post marks the official launch of the Charm City Postgres Meetup group. Our goal is to help bring together the growing community of Developers, DBAs, DBREs, and other technologist in the greater Baltimore area who are working with Postgres. We’re currently working to organize folks and would encourage interested people to sign-up on the meetup site, and have set an initial meetup at Smart Office @ BWI. If you have questions or want to speak, sponsor, or host a meeting in the future, you can contact me either through the meetup page or find me on the Postgres Team Slack.