Archive for 2008

Here’s how to do serious scaling with PostgreSQL for pennies:

Use pgpool for replication, load-balancing and failover
Run the whole thing on Amazon Web Services like Soocial

Done. There were some examples in AWS’ docs suggesting an “average web database of 100gb” with 100 I/Os per second would cost around $36/month to run. I’m pretty sure [...]

I have been working with a contractor in India recently on a Javascript project using Ext. I wanted to outsource the front-end development since we have extensive APIs that would take an outside developer longer to get up to speed on. Due to PCI DSS and general security practices however, we can’t just [...]

In my previous post, I detailed my desire to convert from char(35) to Postgres’ native uuid datatype for storing ColdFusion UUIDs. I ran into a handful of problems and Andrew shared this tidbit of Postgres SQL that I haven’t used before:
ALTER TABLE uuidtest ALTER COLUMN uidTest TYPE uuid USING uidTest::uuid;
I ran this on my [...]

Quick tip for anyone using ColdFusion’s serializeJSON routine for Javascript applications. The type conversion from CF to JSON is finicky and there are times when you need more finely grained control. Specifically using an Ext combobox, we ran into an issue where an <option> value of 0 was treated as false preventing selection [...]

Pretend you have a few thousand lines of Javascript that leverages Ext. It works great in some browsers but in other browsers it just doesn’t work. Nada. It fails silently. And the completely useless choad these vendors pass off as a Javascript debugger gives you zero feedback. Imagine that, despite [...]

A warning for anyone who uses the “Disable type checking” in the ColdFusion administrator:
This one took me a long time to debug today… I have a “formbean” defined in my Transfer ORM configuration with a onetomany relationship named “Child” that references itself. This allows a parent-child relationship. I had a typo in my [...]

I’ve been reading through a handful of Jochem’s posts about Adobe’s (incompatible with the standard 35-character) UUID and the rest of the worlds UUID/GUID (36-character). Since PostgreSQL introduced UUIDs in 8.3, I have been thinking about trying to convert my UUID primary keys to the native type in order to gain speed and reduce [...]

Yesterday, a colleague and friend, Steve Walsh, died of a heart attack at his gym. He was 45. I know Steve through the BMW Car Club of America where we both volunteer to instruct high performance driving to anyone who wants to learn to be a better driver. In the last year, [...]

I put together an Ant script today to generate builds for cfpayment and am posting the most current build for public review. We have gateways and working unit test coverage for Braintree, iTransact and Skipjack gateways. This should be everything needed to add your own gateway (and, ahem, contribute it back to the [...]

A cool development for the Postgres community is the new Turnkey Appliances for PostgreSQL:
We just released TurnKey PostgreSQL, an easy-to-use, lightweight, installable live CD of the PostgreSQL relational database engine that can run on real hardware in addition to most types of virtual machines. It features a Mac OS X-themed Web management interface and a [...]