CRAIG KERSTIENS
psql is a CLI editor that ships with Postgres. It’s incredibly powerful for working with Postgres, and doesn’t take too much of a learning curve to start to get comfortable so you can really feel like an expert working with your database. Just a rundown of a few things to get you started: Once connected in psql you can get an idea of all utility commands available with: \ ? A handy…
I’m often asked what do I think the future for Postgres holds, and my answer has been mostly the same for probably 8 years now, maybe even longer. You see for Postgres itself stability and reliability is core. So where does the new stuff come from if it’s not in the stable core… extensions . Extensions within Postgres are unlike most other databases allowing you to modify or…
If you want to seem like the smartest person in the room, wait for a break in conversation, after sitting quiet for 15 minutes, and ask “What problem are we trying to solve here?” It works every time. We’ve all been there. You walk into a meeting, there are 10 people in it. It gets rolling, different folks chiming in. A few people seem to be taking personal notes, they always do. There…
What do I mean by trick/hack? This can be super flexible, but I’ll toss out a few of my own personal ones. One of the rules of my product management philosophy, is if you’re going to use a tool or trick then use it often. This is in fact one of my favorite interview questions for PMs. If you ever interview with me, be prepared it’s coming. It applies for engineering managers and others in…
7 years ago I left Heroku. Heroku has had a lot of discussion over the past weeks about its demise, whether it was a success or failure, and the current state. Much of this was prompted by the recent, and on-going security incident, but as others have pointed out the product has been frozen in time for some years now. I’m not here to rehash the many debates of what is the next Heroku, or…
Was having a conversation with a founder earlier today and the topic of hiring functional leaders came up. I offered one of my common pieces of advice which was don’t hold the reins too tightly once you hire them. It’s something I see happen over and over to first time founders. You hire a new VP of Product and then still continue to oversee so much of the product process yourself. It…
A few months ago there was a tweet from @jasoncwarner about leadership skills/super powers: SQL Excel Concise writing Story telling Prioritization. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in product management roles, and in recent years more in leadership. I’ve found a lot of the skills in product to translate into good leadership skills as well, but maybe I’m bluring the lines there.…
At past jobs I’d estimate we had 100 different production apps that in some way were powering key production systems. Sure some were backend/internal apps while others key production apps such as the dashboard itself. At other companies we had a smaller handful of Heroku apps that powered our cloud service, about 5-10 in total. Even just working with those internal apps it’s a number…
One of my most fascinating work experiences was going through the spokesperson certification process at a large tech co. This isn’t some rubber stamp virtual training to not use profanity on stage type training. This is the training they would give to any executive before you were greenlit to talk to press. When I say press I mean Techcrunch, but also Bloomberg, or Jim Cramer, or any major…
I think back to my time in college, and I learned some valuable things. I also learned some incredibly worthless things (i.e. don’t flip a car upside down and then backover… it’ll break the axle so you can’t roll it). Even in classes… the basic approach to a supply/demand curve to maximize profit is cute when done in a classroom vs. the complexities of how things…
I’ve been at dinners before with developers that admitted developers, themselves included, can be a bit opinionated. In one case one said for example, “I love Postgres, but I have no idea why.” They were sitting at the wrong table to use Postgres as an example… But it is quite often that I am asked Why Postgres . In fact a little over a year ago good friend Dimitri…
I’ve been to a lot of conferences over the years. PgConf EU , PostgresOpen , too many pgDays to count, and even more none Postgres conferences (OSCON, Strangeloop, Railsconf, PyCon, LessConf, and many more). I’ve always found Postgres conferences one of the best places to get training and learn about what’s new with Postgres (in addition to Dimitri’s recent book, more on…
Offsites an invaluable tool in getting a team aligned. I’ve been a part of organizations where offsites never happened, and then when they happened at a regular interval. Just because offsites happened it didn’t mean they had the same significant impact to alignment and ability to execute moving forward. What follows is a few key principles around conducting an impactful offsite. Get…
I’ve worked as a PM at a number of size companies for a few years now. At a startup and then as a part of a larger company once startups were acquired. I’ve been the first PM for a team as well as first for a company. I’ve written at times about product management, and today I’d like to drill into one aspect that doesn’t seem to get talked about enough and that is the…
When I first moved to the Bay area I was fresh out of grad school. I was frequently heading out to dinner or to happy hour after work with colleagues. I was young and single, so why not of course. As time passed, marriage, kids, etc. the ability to go out for a quick drink or dinner was competing with various priorities. Dinner and drinks with co-workers was always a great time. It wasn’t…
I interact with a lot of people in a given week, a few in person and far more on video and conference calls. I don’t claim to be a perfect person to talk to on the phone, but over the past several years I’ve noticed how painful some conference call experiences can be. As more and more work is conducted virtually and not face to face an ability to do communicate well on conference/voice…
I send way too many emails in a day. My inbox is very intermingled with my to do list and often represents some form of it. More relevant though is that email is a primary means of how I accomplish work. Being a PM I work cross functionally with other teams (from marketing, to engineering, to sales, to BD, to other product teams) and of course customers. Having to work so cross functionality…
Talking with a startup a few days ago they asked for my opinions on OKRs. I have slightly mixed opinions on them overall and started to disclose some of those. Though in sharing some of this I had a few immediate realizations that might be broadly applicable. The crux of his question was, at what stage should we put them in place. I’ve seen a few companies try to put in some form of OKR, and…
I make it to a lot of conferences these days. I often see colleagues, former colleagues, and friends at these conferences. Sometimes it is friends I haven’t seen in a few years, sometimes I just saw the same person in a different country the week before. Conferences now are much easier for me, in fact it is a bit hard to recall what the experience was like when I first started attending, but…
It feels like we’re starting to pass the peak of the hype cycle of microservices. It’s no longer multiple times a week we now see a blog post of “How I migrated my monolith to 150 services”. Now I often hear a bit more of the counter: “I don’t hate my monolith, I just care that things stay performant”. We’ve actually seen some migrations from…
For much of my career I’ve been focused on building out developer or data focused products with the customer in some form or fashion being a developer on the other end. I fully realize now that I’m destined to spend the rest of my career in that space, either that or trying my hand at wine making. There are a few things that I personally find rewarding about the space that I’ve…
Often times when I’m traveling on the east coast, whether it is NYC area or back home down south I try to spend some time to catch up with various people. In catching up we’ll spend some time talking about what we’re both up to, thoughts on tech or in general, and at the end I typically ask “Is there anything in particular I can help with?” More often than not the…
I’ve learned a lot of skills over the course of my career, but no technical skill more useful than SQL. SQL stands out to me as the most valuable skill for a few reasons: It is valuable across different roles and disciplines Learning it once doesn’t really require re-learning You seem like a superhero. You seem extra powerful when you know it because of the amount of people that…
Postgres has experienced a long and great run. It is over 20 years old and has a track record of being safe and reliable (which is the top thing I care about in a database). In recent years it has become more cool with things like JSONB , JIT support , and a powerful extension ecosystem. But, Postgres has made some mistakes along the way, the most notable being the name. Postgres gets its name…
Postgres 11 is almost here, in fact the latest beta shipped today, and it features a lot of exciting improvements. If you want to get the full list of features it is definitely worth checking out the release notes , but for those who don’t read the release notes I put together a run down of some what I consider the highlight features. Quitting Postgres This is a small usability feature, but…
PostgresOpen is just a few months away and our list of talks is now live and available on the PostgresOpen website. This year selecting the talks was the hardest yet not only due to the number of talk submissions, but also the across the board high quality of submissions. There is hopefully something for everyone among the talks, at least if you like Postgres that is. If you’re thinking…
Many of us have known how great Postgres was for years . In fact I recall a conversation with some sales engineers about 6 years ago that previously worked for a large database vendor that really no one likes down in Redwood City. They were remarking how the biggest threat to them was Postgres. At first they were able to just brush it off saying it was open source and no real database could be…
Postgres has a rich set of features, even when working everyday with it you may not discover all it has to offer. In hopes of learning some new features that I didn’t know about myself as well as seeing what small gems people found joy in I tweeted out to see what people came back from. The response was impressive, and rather than have it lost into ether of twitter I’m capturing some…
I spend a lot of time with dev tool and data companies. I think I’ve more or less banished myself to a life of working in the space, no consumer products for me. In that world a common topic that comes up amongst marketing teams is how do I get my team to contribute to content? Sometimes the person already has an idea of how they want the team to jump onto the bandwagon of their plan,…
In my career I’ve had to conduct a number of retrospectives. Ahead of them it already sucked, there was an outage at some point, customers were impacted, and it was our fault. Never was it solely on our underlying infrastructure provider (AWS or Heroku), nope the blame was on us and we’d failed in some way. And as soon as the incident was resolved, it wasn’t time to go home and…
Postgres is an interesting open source project. It’s truly one of a kind, it has its own license to prove it as opposed to falling under something like Apache or GPL. The Postgres community structure is something that is pretty well defined if you’re involved in the community, but to those outside it’s likely a little less clear. In case you’re curious to learn more about…
Dear Postgres, I’ve always felt an affinity for you in my 9 years of working with you. I know others have known you longer, but that doesn’t mean they love you more. Years ago when others complained about your rigidness or that you weren’t as accommodating as others I found solace in your steadfast values: Don’t lose data Adhere to standards Move forward with a balancing…
Managing connections in Postgres is a topic that seems to come up several times a week in conversations. I’ve written some about scaling your connections and the right approach when you truly need a high level of connections, which is to use a connection pooler like pgBouncer. But what do you do before that point and how can you better track what is going on with your connections in…
As your database grows and scales there are some operations that you need to take more care of than you did when you were just starting. When working with your application in your dev environment you may not be fully aware of the cost of some operations until you run them against production. And at some point most of us have been guilty of it, running some migration that starts at 5 minutes, then…
It’s not a very disputed topic that you should backup your database, and further test your backups. What is a little less discussed, at least for Postgres, is the types of backups that exist. Within Postgres there are two forms of backups and understanding them is a useful foundation for anyone working with Postgres. The two backup types are Physical: which consist of the actual bytes on…
This year Postgres open and PGConf SV have combined to great a bigger and better conference right in downtown San Francisco. I’m obviously biased as I’m one of the co-chairs, and I know every conference organizer says picking the talks was hard, but I’m especially excited for the line-up this year . The hard part for me is going to be which talks do I miss out on because…
A massive amount of reporting queries, whether really intensive data analysis, or just basic insights into your business involving looking at data over a certain time period. Postgres has really rich support for dealing with time out of the box, something that’s often very underweighted when dealing with a database. Sure, if you have a time-series database it’s implied, but even then…
Five years ago I wrote a post that got some good attention on why you should use Postgres. Almost a year later I added a bunch of things I missed. Many of those items bear repeating, and I’ll recap a few of those in the latter half of this post. But in the last 4-5 years there’s been a lot of improvements and more reasons added to the list of why you should use Postgres. Here’s…
JSONB is an awesome datatype in Postgres. I find myself using it on a weekly basis these days. Often in using some API (such as clearbit ) I’ll get a JSON response back, instead of parsing that out into a table structure it’s really easy to throw it into a JSONB then query for various parts of it. If you’re not familiar with JSONB, it’s a binary representation of JSON in…
It seems each week when I’m reviewing data with someone a feature comes up that they had no idea existed within Postgres. In an effort to continue documenting many of the features and functionality that are useful, here’s a list of just a few that you may find handy the next time your working with your data. Psql, and \e This one I’ve covered before , but it’s worth…
For the second time now I’ve had to implement a system that syncs from my system of record into Salesforce.com, the first at Heroku and now at Citus Data . The case here is pretty simple, I have a software-as-a-service, B2B product. It’s a homegrown application in these cases in Ruby, but could be Python, .Net, any language of your choosing. The problem is I don’t want to have to…
Open DNS is a DNS resolver that caches records beyond their TTL if the upstream DNS server cannot be found. In cases like today’s major outage it can be handy to swap your DNS settings out for this, or it may be worth using as a standard default. Resolution may be a bit slow as it will try to see if the upstream server cannot be found, but it at least can get you back to a working state. If…
SQL can be a powerful language for reporting. Whether you’re just exploring some data, or generating reports that show month over month revenue growth it’s the lingua franca for data analysis. But, your data isn’t always in a SQL database, even then if you’re using Postgres you can still likely use SQL to analyze, query, even joing with that data. Foreign data wrappers have…
When you start out as a developer there’s an overwhelming amount of things to grasp. First there’s the language itself, then all the quirks of the specific framework you’re using,and after that (or maybe before) we’ll throw front-end development into the mix, and somewhere along the line you have to decide to store your data somewhere. Early on, with so many things to…
Notice : Much of this post still applies, but now applies more directly to Citus. Since this post originally published, pg_shard is now deprecated. You can find some further guidance for sharding on the Citus blog and docs Back in 2012 I wrote an overview of database sharding. Since then I’ve had a few questions about it, which have really increased in frequency over the last two months. As…
In recent months I’ve had the question nearly once a week about advice/tips for becoming a Product Manager or more commonly referred to as PM. These are generally coming from people that are either currently engineers, or previously were and are in some engineer/customer role such as a sales engineer or solution architect. There’s a number of high level pieces talking about PM and it…
Marketing often feels like a dirty-icky thing to many developers. Well until you feel like you have a great product, but no one using it then you have to get a crash course in all of that. And while I might cover some of the actual basics in the future, just knowing what marketing people actually mean when they’re talking can be a huge jump start. Here’s a guide that distills many of the…
A number of times in a crowd I’ve asked how many people enjoy writing SQL, and often there’s a person or two. The follow up is how many people enjoy reading other people’s SQL and that’s unanimously 0. The reason for this is that so many people write bad SQL. It’s not that it doesn’t do the job, it’s just that people don’t tend to treat SQL the same…
I find during the holiday season many pick up new books , learn a new language , or brush up on some other skill in general. Here’s my contribution to hopefully giving you a few new things to learn about Postgres and ideally utilize in the new year. It’s not in a top 10 list as much as 10 tips and tricks you should be aware of as when you need them they become incredibly handy. But,…
The headline of Postgres 9.5 is undoubtedly: Insert… on conflict do nothing/update or more commonly known as Upsert or Merge. This removes one of the last remaining features which other databases had over Postgres. Sure we’ll take a look at it, but first let’s browse through some of the other features you can look forward to when Postgres 9.5 lands: Grouping sets, cube, rollup…