Time for yet another “first patch” idea post ;-) This time it’s about BRIN indexes. Postgres has a contrib module called amcheck, meant to check logical consistency of objects (tables and indexes). At the moment the module supports heap relations (i.e. tables) and B-Tree indexes (by far the most commonly used index type). There is a patch adding support for GiST and GIN indexes, and the idea is to also allow checking BRIN indexes.
I’ve submitted a lot of talk proposals to a lot of Postgres conferences over the years. Some got accepted, many more were not. And I’ve been on the other side of this process too, as a member of the CfP committee responsible for selecting talks. So let me give you a couple suggestions on how to write a good talk proposal.
Let me present another “first patch” idea, related to a runtime stats on access to files storing data. Having this kind of information would be very valuable on instances with many files (which can happen for many reasons).
This is a very different area than the patch idea, which was about an extension. The runtime stats are at the core of the system, and so is the interaction with the file systems. But it’s still fairly isolated, and thus suitable for new contributors.
I’ve decided to experiment a little bit and do regular “office hours.” I’ll be available to chat about almost anything related to Postgres. It might be a technical discussion about a patch you’re working on, or a topic about the community etc.
This is not an entirely new thing. I’ve been telling people to just ping me if they want to discuss something off-list, or have a call and chat about it.
In an earlier post I mentioned I plan to share a couple patch ideas, suitable for new contributors. This is the first one, about using COPY protocol for postgres_fdw batching. This would replace the current implementation, based on prepared statements. Let me share a couple thoughts on the motivation and how it might be implemented.
