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The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of PostgreSQL 10, the latest version of the world's most advanced open source database.

A critical feature of modern workloads is the ability to distribute data across many nodes for faster access, management, and analysis, which is also known as a "divide and conquer" strategy. The PostgreSQL 10 release includes significant enhancements to effectively implement the divide and conquer strategy, including native logical replication, declarative table partitioning, and improved query parallelism.

"Our developer community focused on building features that would take advantage of modern infrastructure setups for distributing workloads," said Magnus Hagander, a core team member of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group. "Features such as logical replication and improved query parallelism represent years of work and demonstrate the continued dedication of the community to ensuring Postgres leadership as technology demands evolve."

This release also marks the change of the versioning scheme for PostgreSQL to a "x.y" format. This means the next minor release of PostgreSQL will be 10.1 and the next major release will be 11.

Logical Replication - A publish/subscribe framework for distributing data

Logical replication extends the current replication features of PostgreSQL with the ability to send modifications on a per-database and per-table level to different PostgreSQL databases. Users can now fine-tune the data replicated to various database clusters and will have the ability to perform zero-downtime upgrades to future major PostgreSQL versions.

"We have been heavily using PostgreSQL since 9.3 and are very excited about version 10 since it brings basis for long-awaited partitioning and built-in logical replication. It will allow us to use PostgreSQL in even more services," said Vladimir Borodin, DBA Team Lead at Yandex.

Declarative Table Partitioning - Convenience in dividing your data

Table partitioning has existed for years in PostgreSQL but required a user to maintain a nontrivial set of rules and triggers for the partitioning to work. PostgreSQL 10 introduces a table partitioning syntax that lets users easily create and maintain range and list partitioned tables. The addition of the partitioning syntax is the first step in a series of planned features to provide a robust partitioning framework within PostgreSQL.

Improved Query Parallelism - Quickly conquer your analysis

PostgreSQL 10 provides better support for parallelized queries by allowing more parts of the query execution process to be parallelized. Improvements include additional types of data scans that are parallelized as well as optimizations when the data is recombined, such as pre-sorting. These enhancements allow results to be returned more quickly.

Quorum Commit for Synchronous Replication - Distribute data with confidence

PostgreSQL 10 introduces quorum commit for synchronous replication, which allows for flexibility in how a primary database receives acknowledgement that changes were successfully written to remote replicas. An administrator can now specify that if any number of replicas has acknowledged that a change to the database has been made, then the data can be considered safely written.

"Quorum commit for synchronous replication in PostgreSQL 10 gives more options to extend our ability to promote database infrastructure with nearly zero downtime from the application perspective. This allows us to continuously deploy and update our database infrastructure without incurring long maintenance windows," said Curt Micol, Staff Infrastructure Engineer at Simple Finance.

SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication - Secure your data access

The Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism (SCRAM) defined in RFC5802 defines a protocol to improve upon the secure storage and transmission of passwords by providing a framework for strong password negotiation. PostgreSQL 10 introduces the SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication method, defined in RFC7677, to provide better security than the existing MD5-based password authentication method.

Links

• Downloads
• Press Kit
• Release Notes
• What's New in 10

About PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is the world's most advanced open source database, with a global community of thousands of users, contributors, companies and organizations. The PostgreSQL Project builds on over 30 years of engineering, starting at the University of California, Berkeley, and has continued with an unmatched pace of development. PostgreSQL's mature feature set not only matches top proprietary database systems, but exceeds them in advanced database features, extensibility, security and stability. Learn more about PostgreSQL and participate in our community at PostgreSQL.org.

– The official Olympus OMD group posted this tribute post for the Olympus MDN: How many of you have heard of the MDN? The MDN was the centerpiece of a prototype modular 35-mm camera system called the M-System developed by…

The post Olympus MDN tribute post appeared first on 43 Rumors.

In early September, I gave a live demo of Postgres 10 replication at the Postgres Open conference in California. As part of the prep work, I dusted off one of my old projects... "Pagila". For those unfamiliar, Pagila was a port of the Sakila sample database, created by Mike Hillyer for MySQL. The goal of the project was to provide a simple schema with similarities to other systems showcasing different Postgres features. Originally I hosted it on PgFoundry back in the day and for the most part it has lived there quietly, until now.

One of the reasons Postgres 10 is significant for Pagila is that Pagila contains an example partitioned table, and as many have heard, Postgres 10 contains an initial release of simplified partitioning capabilities. While not particularly useful (yet) compared to the current partitioning capabilities, for the purposes of showing off examples, it was time to update the Pagila schema to show off this new feature. And given I had to do that work, I thought maybe it was time to make a new "official" release.

So, I've now created a new Pagila project page on Github. Unfortunately I was unable to get a full copy of the pervious versions from PgFoundry to do a full import, but I did have some copies of older releases lying around, so I used those to recreate the history in git for past branches. This means if you need a version of the schema that works on postgres 9.x, you can checkout one of the older branches. Once Postgres 10 is finally released, I'll go ahead an tag/branch a version 10 release to complement it. In the mean time, please feel free to play with this, and if you'd like to contribute, you can find me on the Postgres Slack Team or submit a pull request through Github.

Musab Hassan Yousef is the so-called “Green Prince”. The son of one of the founders of the Hamas, Yousef turned against that terrorist organisation and became such a supporter of Israel that this Ramallah-born Arab served for some years as an informant for the Israeli Shin Bet security service.

Thus much is well known: there is a book and even a movie about this man. Nevertheless, when the campaigning group UN Watch brought him to speak to the UN no-one seems to have expected what was coming.

The reaction was as comical as the underlying situation is unforgiveable. The UN, the crucible of defamatory lies and libels against Israel because of the dominance there of the Arab block and its global allies, rarely hears the brutal truth about the Palestinian leadership – and certainly not by someone with Yousef’s pedigree. Watch this video of what Yousef said – and watch the faces around him as he said it.

Priceless.

The post The faces said it all appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

I am delighted to tell you that an updated version of my personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel, is to be published in America at the end of January. Through the prism of my own often painful journey, I chart the devastating changes that have engulfed the west over the past several decades.

I will be in the US in the last two weeks of February to promote the book. If you would like me to talk about my memoir (and other stuff too) to your organisation during that time, please get in touch with me at this email address: joshuamelanie@gmail.com.

The post Guardian Angel in America appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Les services numériques offerts et utilisés par nos administrations publiques sont les infrastructures critiques du 21e siècle des nations démocratiques. Afin d’établir des systèmes fiables, les institutions publiques doivent faire en sorte d’avoir le contrôle entier du logiciel et des systèmes informatiques au cœur de notre infrastructure numérique étatique. Ce n’est pourtant pas le cas actuellement pour des raisons de licences logicielles restrictives.

Aujourd'hui, 31 organisations publient une lettre ouverte dans laquelle elles appellent le législateur à mettre en œuvre une législation qui requiert que le logiciel financé par le contribuable pour le secteur public soit disponible publiquement sous une licence de Logiciel Libre et Open Source. Les premiers signataires incluent CCC, EDRi, Free Software Foundation Europe, KDE, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, Open Source Business Alliance, Open Source Initiative, The Document Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, ainsi que plusieurs autres organisations; elles invitent les individus à signer la lettre ouverte. La lettre ouverte sera envoyée aux candidats pour les élections législatives en Allemagne et, pendant les prochains mois, jusqu'aux élections européennes en 2019, aux autres responsables politiques de l'UE et des États membres.

“Parce que le code source des logiciels propriétaires est souvent un secret d’affaires, la difficulté de trouver des failles de sécurité accidentelles ou volontaires dans des logiciels critiques augmente radicalement. La rétro-ingénierie de logiciels propriétaires dans le but de les améliorer ou les renforcer est une nécessité absolue dans l’environnement d’aujourd’hui, mais cette condition technique élémentaire est illégale dans de nombreuses circonstances et juridictions. Après que des infrastructures stratégiques telles que des hôpitaux, des usines automobiles et des cargos de fret aient toutes été déconnectées cette année à cause de failles dissimulées dans du logiciel propriétaire, un Code non vérifiable est un luxe que les États ne peuvent plus compenser avec des privilèges juridiques spéciaux sans le payer en vies humaines.

En ce moment-même, la majorité des plans de notre infrastructure la plus critique n’est tout simplement pas disponible au public. En alignant le financement public avec une obligation de Logiciel Libre (NdT Free software en anglais) – “Free” dans le sens de la disponibilité publique du code et non pas du coût – nous pouvons trouver et réparer les failles avant qu’elles ne soient utilisées pour éteindre la lumière dans l’hôpital d'à côté.”

Edward Snowden, Président de la Freedom of the Press Foundation à propos du lancement de la campagne “Public Money Public Code”.

Les institutions publiques dépensent chaque année des millions d'euros dans le développement de nouveaux logiciels sur mesure pour leurs besoins. La procédure d'appel d'offre joue un rôle fondamental sur quelles entreprises sont autorisées à entrer en compétition et quels logiciels sont payés avec l'argent du contribuable. Les administrations publiques à différents niveaux rencontrent souvent des problèmes pour partager le code source du logiciel entre elles, même si elles ont entièrement financé son développement. De plus, sans la possibilité pour des tiers indépendants d'effectuer des audits ou d'autres contrôles de sécurité sur le code, les données sensibles des citoyens sont en danger.

"Nous avons besoin de logiciels qui favorisent l’échange de bonnes pratiques et solutions. C’est seulement ainsi que nous pourrons améliorer les services informatiques aux personnes dans toute l'Europe. Nous avons besoin de logiciels qui aident les administrations publiques à reprendre le plein contrôle de leur infrastructure numérique et stratégique, leur permettant de devenir et rester indépendantes d’une poignée d’entreprises."

Matthias Kirschner, Président de la Free Software Foundation Europe.

C'est pourquoi les signataires appellent les représentants dans toute l'Europe à moderniser l'infrastructure publique pour permettre aux autres administrations, entreprises, ou individus de pouvoir librement utiliser, comprendre, modifier et partager les logiciels. Ces droits permettent de soutenir d'autres droits fondamentaux tels que la liberté d'expression, la liberté de la presse et la vie privée. Ceci garantit que les administrations publiques ne subissent le cloisonnement captif d'entreprises spécifiques qui utilisent des licences restrictives pour entraver la concurrence, ainsi que de veiller à ce que le code source soit accessible afin de pouvoir sceller les portes dérobées et réparer les failles de sécurité sans dépendre d’un unique prestataire de services.

"Les institutions publiques sont financées par l’impôt. Elles devraient utiliser les finances publiques d'une manière responsable et le plus efficacement possible dans l’intérêt général. S’il s’agit d’argent public, le code devrait être également public !" dit Kirschner.

Argent Public ? Code Public ! = Public Money? Public Code!

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The FSFE and Open Forum Europe teamed up for an initiative to show the implications of the proposed EU copyright reform for the Free Software development ecosystem: Save Code Share. As part of this initiative, today we release our White Paper which highlights the ways in which the proposed Article 13 could unintentionally harm the communities and the businesses built around Free Software.

Free Software is often built by collaborative networks of programmers that rely on code hosting services. Free Software allows and encourages modifications and improvements made by everyone. For that, the software is shared with everybody under terms that allow using it, studying its source code, sharing it along, and customising it according to one's needs. This is often done on code sharing platforms.

With its copyright proposal, the EU has decided to update the rules applicable for online service providers, mainly targeting content sharing platforms. The new rules proposed by the EU will create legal uncertainty for developers using online tools when contributing to the Free Software projects through online code sharing platforms. Those proposed obligations on code sharing platforms will threaten their existence, and effective online co-development by:

After explaining how Free Software platforms work in practice, the White Paper shows how Article 13 restricts important fundamental rights of developers and internet users such as the right to privacy, freedom of expression, and the freedom to conduct a business. Article 13, as currently proposed, would shift the responsibility for protecting allegedly infringed rights from rightholders to the platforms, in a way that would harm fundamental rights and negatively impact collaborative software development, and especially Free Software.

If Article 13 has completely missed this impact in the software sharing environment, it is likely that there are other unforeseen impacts that the proposed Copyright Directive can have. The legislators need to make sure they understand where and how innovation takes place nowadays, to fully grasp the consequences and implications that the proposed Article 13 can create for our economy and our society.

Read our White Paper in full here.

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Digital services offered and used by public administrations are the critical infrastructure of 21st-century democratic nations. To establish trustworthy systems, government agencies must ensure they have full control over systems at the core of our digital infrastructure. This is rarely the case today due to restrictive software licences.

Today, 31 organisations are publishing an open letter in which they call for lawmakers to advance legislation requiring publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. The initial signatories include CCC, EDRi, Free Software Foundation Europe, KDE, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, openSUSE, Open Source Business Alliance, Open Source Initiative, The Document Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, as well as several others; they ask individuals and other organisation to sign the open letter. The open letter will be sent to candidates for the German Parliament election and, during the coming months, until the 2019 EU parliament elections, to other representatives of the EU and EU member states.

"Because the source code of proprietary software is often a business secret, it radically increases the difficulty of discovering both accidental and intentional security flaws in critical software. Reverse engineering proprietary software to improve or strengthen it is an absolute necessity in today's environment, but this basic technical requirement is unlawful in many circumstances and jurisdictions. With critical infrastructure such as hospitals, automobile factories, and freight shippers having all been brought offline this year due to flaws concealed within proprietary software, unauditable code is a liability that states can no longer subsidize with special legal privileges without incurring a cost denominated in lives.

Right now, the blueprints for much of our most critical public infrastructure are simply unavailable to the public. By aligning public funding with a Free Software requirement -- "Free" referring to public code availability, not cost -- we can find and fix flaws before they are used to turn the lights out in the next hospital."

Edward Snowden, President of the Freedom of the Press Foundation about the "Public Money Public Code" campaign launch.

Public institutions spend millions of euros each year on the development of new software tailored to their needs. The procurement choices of the public sector play a significant role in determining which companies are allowed to compete and what software is supported with tax payers' money. Public administrations on all levels frequently have problems sharing code with each other, even if they funded its complete development. Furthermore, without the option for independent third parties to run audits or other security checks on the code, sensible citizen data is at risk.

"We need software that fosters the sharing of good ideas and solutions. Only like this will we be able to improve digital services for people all over Europe. We need software that guarantees freedom of choice, access, and competition. We need software that helps public administrations regain full control of their critical digital infrastructure, allowing them to become and remain independent from a handful of companies."

Matthias Kirschner, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe.

That is why the signatories call on representatives all around Europe to modernise their digital infrastructure to allow other public administrations, companies, or individuals to freely use, study, share and improve applications developed with public money. Thereby providing safeguards for the public administration against being locked in to services from specific companies that use restrictive licences to hinder competition, and ensuring that the source code is accessible so that back doors and security holes can be fixed without depending on only one service provider.

"Public bodies are financed through taxes. They should spend funds responsibly and in the most efficient way possible. If it is public money, it should be public code as well!" says Kirschner.

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The Postgres hackers list is a steady-stream of great ideas and discussion, but occasionally something comes along that really makes you sit back and think, "Wow, where did that come from?" Such was a February 2017 email from Konstantin Knizhnik presenting a proof-of-concept vectorization optimization for the executor.

In May Andres Freund presented a plan for speeding up the executor using Just In Time Compilation (JIT) and LLVM. This work is pending for Postgres 11. (In fact, it was almost committed to Postgres 10 on April Fool's Day.)

Konstantin's work adds vectorization to the executor, which can be revolutionary. Once Andres's work is in, we can research how to make the executor even faster using vectorization. This would open up Postgres to an entirely new class of big-data applications.

PostgreSQL Automatic Failover (PAF) v2.2.0 has been released on September 12th 2017 under the PostgreSQL licence.

See: https://github.com/dalibo/PAF/releases/tag/v2.2.0

PAF is a PostgreSQL resource agent for Pacemaker. Its original aim is to keep it clear between the Pacemaker administration and the PostgreSQL one, to keep things simple, documented and yet powerful.

This release features:

• the support of PostgreSQL 10
• a new "maxlag" parameter to exclude lagging slaves from promotion
• ability to deal with multiple PostgreSQL instances in the same cluster
• comprehensive error messages directly in crm_mon!

Source code and releases are available on github:

• https://github.com/dalibo/PAF/
• https://github.com/dalibo/PAF/releases

Documentation, procedures, community support as well:

• http://dalibo.github.io/PAF/
• http://dalibo.github.io/PAF/documentation.html
• https://github.com/dalibo/PAF/issues

Please, use the pgsql-general@postgresql.org or users@clusterlabs.org mailing lists if you have questions.

Any feedback is welcomed.

This article, originally from the Wall Street Journal, explains how government entitlements grow larger over time, and only drastic action allows them to be trimmed. This article gives personal experience by a labeled "hater". If they keep this up, "hate" will no longer be considered a bad word.

Here is a great article about a non-profit that labels other non-profits with which it disagrees as hate groups. Maybe someone needs to label them as a hate group, or maybe we can all agree that labeling people and groups is counterproductive, and in some ways hateful itself.

Don't get me started on the condescending "The Hate Has No Home Here" lawn signs. Suffice it to say that if their goal is to alienate people, they are effective.

Update: Another article about the problems with mislabeling things we don't like.

Like many open-source projects, Postgres is written in the C programming language. However, with the code base being 31 years old, a lot of specialized C infrastructure has been added over the years to simplify server programming, e.g. memory management, caching, system catalog access, tuple access, error handing.

While this infrastructure helps experienced developers be productive, it often confuses people studying the Postgres source code because you have to understand the infrastructure to understand the code. Robert Haas makes this point clear in an email post:

A system like PostgreSQL is almost a language of its own; we don't really code for PostgreSQL in C, but in "PG-C". Learning the PG-specific idioms is arguably more work than learning C itself …

Continue Reading »

"The IT industry operates like the fashion industry: every few years -- and the number keeps getting smaller -- a "new" data technology pops up, with vendors, the trade media and various "experts" all stepping over each other to claim that it'll "revolutionize your business" and unless you jump on the bandwagon, you'll be "left behind." But time and again these prove to be fads lacking a sound foundation. Huge resources are invested in migrations from fad to fad, rather than in productive work (Don't believe the hype about Hadoop usage, Basta, Big Data It's Time to Say Arrivederci)."

David Hirsh’s must-see video, Whitewashed: Antisemitism in the Labour Party (which you can view below) starts with a truly shocking clip of Jeremy Corbyn speaking. Having referred to the profoundly anti-Jewish, murderous terrorist organisations Hezbollah and Hamas as his “friends”, he says (of either or both): “The idea that an organisation that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about long term peace and social justice, and political justice, in the whole region should be labelled a terrorist organisation by the British government is a big, big historical mistake”.

Hirsh’s film not only highlights examples of the antisemitism in the Labour party, but observes the appalling way in which Jews who draw attention to this are dismissed as “lying for Israel”. It states what so many on the left deny: that while in theory it is possible to be anti-Zionist but not anti-Jew, in practice the distinction is meaningless.

As one speaker observes, the Labour Party cannot call itself an anti-racist party if it denies the existence of left-wing antisemitism. Through interviews with Jewish people whose evidence to Baroness Chakrabarti’s vacuous “inquiry” into the issue was ignored, it shows how a report that was supposed to point to solutions to anti-Jewish attitudes in the party ended up as just another manifestation of the problem.

The post Denial: the Labour Party’s antisemitism appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces today that the first beta release of PostgreSQL 10 is available for download. This release contains previews of all of the features which will be available in the final release of version 10, although some details will change before then. Users are encouraged to begin testing their applications against this latest release.

Major Features of 10

The new version contains multiple features that will allow users to both scale out and scale up their PostgreSQL infrastructure:

• Logical Replication: built-in option for replicating specific tables or using replication to upgrade
• Native Table Partitioning: range and list partitioning as native database objects
• Additional Query Parallelism: including index scans, bitmap scans, and merge joins
• Quorum Commit for Synchronous Replication: ensure against loss of multiple nodes

We have also made three improvements to PostgreSQL connections, which we are calling on driver authors to support, and users to test:

• SCRAM Authentication, for more secure password-based access
• Multi-host "failover", connecting to the first available in a list of hosts
• target_session_attrs parameter, so a client can request a read/write host

Additional Features

Many other new features and improvements have been added to PostgreSQL 10, some of which may be as important, or more important, to specific users than the above. Certainly all of them require testing. Among them are:

• Crash-safe and replicable Hash Indexes
• Multi-column Correlation Statistics
• New "monitoring" roles for permission grants
• Latch Wait times in pg_stat_activity
• XMLTABLE query expression
• Restrictive Policies for Row Level Security
• Full Text Search support for JSON and JSONB
• Compression support for pg_receivewal
• ICU collation support
• Push Down Aggregates to foreign servers
• Transition Tables in trigger execution

Further, developers have contributed performance improvements in the SUM() function, character encoding conversion, expression evaluation, grouping sets, and joins against unique columns. Analytics queries against large numbers of rows should be up to 40% faster. Please test if these are faster for you and report back.

See the Release Notes for a complete list of new and changed features.

Test for Bugs and Compatibility

We count on you to test the altered version with your workloads and testing tools in order to find bugs and regressions before the release of PostgreSQL 10. As this is a Beta, minor changes to database behaviors, feature details, and APIs are still possible. Your feedback and testing will help determine the final tweaks on the new features, so test soon. The quality of user testing helps determine when we can make a final release.

Additionally, version 10 contains several changes that are incompatible with prior major releases, particularly renaming "xlog" to "wal" and a change in version numbering. We encourage all users test it against their applications, scripts, and platforms as soon as possible. See the Release Notes and the What's New in 10 page for more details.

Beta Schedule

This is the first beta release of version 10. The PostgreSQL Project will release additional betas as required for testing, followed by one or more release candidates, until the final release in late 2017. For further information please see the Beta Testing page.

Links

• Downloads Page
• Beta Testing Information
• 10 Beta Release Notes
• What's New in 10
• 10 Open Items