Devrim's PostgreSQL Diary

A Norway Government Institution asked me to fix the pgRouting package for PostgreSQL 9.2 on RHEL 6. Their name is "Norsk institutt for skog og landska".

Packaging was not that easy, since they asked me to add "Traveling Salesperson functionality" and "Driving Distance functionality", which required gaul and CGAL packages respectively. CGAL is available in atrpms.net, but the gaul-devel required by TSP functionality required a custom slang, which is actually compat-slang, and because of the termcap changes in RHEL 6, I had to build a custom compat-slang package to build gaul-devel

Anyway, packages are now available for PostgreSQL 9.2 on RHEL 6 x86_64 and RHEL 6 i686. I am also planning to push the package for 9.1 sometime this week. Fedora 17 packages will also be available in preparation for next year's RHEL 7!

Thanks "Norsk institutt for skog og landska" for contributing to community packaging.

I will be attending PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2012. It will be a gret pleasure to see folks from the community.

Anyway, here are my picks for the conference:

Even if you haven't heard before: I'm a fan of Hard Rock Cafe. Some people claim that I am a bit obsessive about it, but that is a different story.

I am collecting goods from all the HRCs that I go -- t-shirts, pins, drum sticks (yes!), bracelets, etc. However, it is not possible (at least nowadays) to visit all HRCs...

...so, if you are coming to Prague for pgconf.eu, and if you live at a place close to your local HRC, I will ask you a pin, shot glasses, two t-shirts (one for my son, one for myself), and some other minor stuff. I don't have unlimited budget, so it will be perfect if you ping me before you go to HRC -- I can give you the details and the budget left.

Thanks! See you in Prague!

I thought this is pretty straightforward, but I decided to write this post after getting a few emails recently.

Note: I updated this post based on a comment by Mikko Tiihonen. I did not remove his comment, so that you can see it)

Fedora has been using systemd, instead of SysV init scripts over the last 3 releases or so. Fedora 16 was the first release that really adopted their init scripts to systemd. There is still a long way to go there it seems, but that is not the topic of this blog post.

Credits first: Tom Lane did most of the work on the systemd changes, and I copied them to PGDG packags. All I did was adjusting them for PGDG layout.

...and a disclaimer: Currently, init-script related stuff is pretty much different between Fedora and PGDG packages -- as you can guess, Fedora packages are much better than PGDG ones, but I'll close the gap pretty soon.

So, this blog post summarizes what is available on Fedora 16 and 17.

Yesterday, Tom (Lane) committed 9.2.0 to Fedora rawhide, and even better, to Fedora 18.

RHEL 7 is said to be based on Fedora 18 (also said here, too), so apparently we skipped 9.1 there, and the shiny new PostgreSQL 9.2 will be on RHEL 7. With its better scalability, I'm sure that RHEL 7 will help us to gain more ground.

PostgreSQL 9.2 was released a few hours before. This is mostly a performance release, and shows great improvement as compared to the previous releases.

...and for sure, I released RPMs for 9.2, too.

Click here to download the 9.2 repo RPMs first.

RPMs are currently available for:

- RHEL/CentOS/Scientific Linux 6 - 32-bit and 64-bit

- RHEL/CentOS/Scientific Linux 5 - 32-bit and 64-bit

- Fedora 17 - 32- bit and 64-bit

- Fedora 16 - 32- bit and 64-bit

I dropped RHEL 4 support as of 9.2, since it was also EOLed by Red Hat, too. There is a slight chance for Fedora 15 packages, but don't hold your breath. I'll push Fedora 18 packages, as soon as Fedora 18 is released.

I was at PGCon this week. I will try to write a separate blog post about this -- but anyway, an advantage of being at a conference that is thousands of miles away from your home is you are not being disturbed at all -- so I took this opportunity to finish 9.2 RPMs.

So, here is the big, detailed, extra long announcement of 9.2 RPMs

As of 9.2, I am dropping support for RHEL/CentOS 4, since Red Hat already EOLed RHEL 4. Similarly, 9.2 will only be available for Fedora 15 and above. I will keep maintaining older branches, until we EOL 9.1

There are probably still some bugs -- let me know if you find one!

I have announced PostGIS 2.0.0 packages last week -- now time for a tutorial about how to install them on RHEL/CentOS/SL 5 and 6.

PostGIS team announced 2.0.0 this week. Kudos to entire team for the great work. It is definitely a milestone both for PostGIS and PostgreSQL.

Just after 3,5 years since its debut, PostgreSQL RPM repository is slowly moving to its final location, which is under postgresql.org.

As of now, we are serving 9.1 packages through yum.postgresql.org (yum.pgrpms.org also works, of course). In the next minor release set, all repo files will point to the new URL.

Thanks PostgreSQL infrastructure team for their great help.

Now you can rsync PostgreSQL RPMs, and create your own mirror to use for internal servers. Here are the modules:

$ rsync yum.postgresql.org::
pgrpm-81 PostgreSQL 8.1 YUM Repository
pgrpm-82 PostgreSQL 8.2 YUM Repository
pgrpm-83 PostgreSQL 8.3 YUM Repository
pgrpm-84 PostgreSQL 8.4 YUM Repository
pgrpm-90 PostgreSQL 9.0 YUM Repository
pgrpm-91 PostgreSQL 9.1 YUM Repository
pgrpm-92 PostgreSQL 9.2 YUM Repository

Since I started this repository about 3,5 years ago, I have always used the machines that were outside control of the community. Namely, I used a machine that was hosted at Darcy Buskermolen's house for about 2 years, and then after the unrecoverable crash of the machine
I moved everything off to a machine that was in the datacenter of my previous employer, markafoni.

After I started working for EnterpriseDB, we again lost the RPM buildfarm. markafoni was kind enough to provide me images, so I have copies of each VM --but we don't have a machine since then. Actually I purchased a quad core machine with 2 TB disk and 8 GB ram for that, but that is in my home, and it is still not under control of PostgreSQL infrastructure team.

While talking to Ed Boyajian at PGEast, he kindly accepted to donate a machine to the community to be used as the PostgreSQL RPM Buildfarm. I was the bottleneck since then, but we made a progress with Dave Page during PGCon, and probably we will have the new machine up and running over the next month or so.

So, in short: We don't have a dedicated RPM Buildfarm over the last 3,5 months, and it is the only explanation that some of the PostgreSQL releases, 8.3 and 8.2, haven't been updated yet to the latest minor releases.

So, project did not stop, and will not stop -- we just need some more time to fix all issues. I also have a long bug list over the last months, and I'll also fix them as soon as we will have the new machine.

Now, I have a logo for my regular presentation on PostgreSQL Clusterijng with Red Hat Cluster Suite

Per Andrew's post, I added support for Scientific Linux to PostgreSQL RPM Repository. Enjoy.