PostgreSQL: Documentation: Manuals: PostgreSQL 7.3: SQL Key Words

It’s very annoying that ‘user’ is a reserved word in postgresql. You also get really crappy error messages (at least with the various forms of quoting I’ve tried to use) when you try to create a table called ‘user’

$ psql web
Welcome to psql 7.4.8, the PostgreSQL interactive terminal.

Type:  \copyright for distribution terms
\h for help with SQL commands
\? for help on internal slash commands
\g or terminate with semicolon to execute query
\q to quit

web=# create table user (a int(10), b int); ERROR:  syntax error at or near “user” at character 14
web=# create table “user” (a int(10), b int);
ERROR:  syntax error at or near “(” at character 27
web=# create table ‘user’ (a int(10), b int);
ERROR:  syntax error at or near “‘user'” at character 14
web=# create table `user` (a int(10), b int);
ERROR:  syntax error at or near “`” at character 14
web=#
web=#

You will even get the “at character X” if you’re piping something into psql. Hrrm… a line number would be useful.

It also means that I can’t compare results from MySQL and Postgresql involving a table called ‘user’. Bummer.

Any postgresql gurus out there got a solution for me?

Try to evaluate this yourself first

I think Kai wins this one, hands down.

Why when running doxygen over the mysql tree (5.0 or 5.1) do I have a process with 590MB of RSS memory?

Not exactly inspiring confidence. Although I guess I’m lucky because I have the RAM to do that in (on any box around here I actually use frequently).

The output of doxygen can be really useful when trying to learn (or remember) the relationships between various bits of code. I find it a bit faster than switching between buffers in an editor and then trying to remember where some class was defined. links are a good thing.

It’d be great if we switched all our public API docs to doxygen, as the output really is quite nice. In fact, internal APIs wouldn’t be bad either. Although, naturally, the real documentation is the source, which (luckily) the doxygen output also makes easy to view.

I’ve rigged up this script to automatically pull the latest out of the public repository (using the free bk client) and generate doxygen docs. About time I share this with the world. get_trees.sh you also need the doxygen template (rename it to Doxyfile.template in the same directory as get_trees.sh)

I run this in cron @daily.

Assume nothing. Your assumptions are wrong, that’s why there’s a bug silly!

If valgrind had a time machine function it’d be totally awesome. But it doesn’t so currently extra work and thinking is required. doh!

I’ve had to fix a few small bugs in the release of phpbms. So I’ve put my bzr archives up

bzr clone http://www.flamingspork.com/src/bms.upstream/

and

bzr clone http://www.flamingspork.com/src/bms.stewart/

Hopefully there’ll be another release soon that incorporates these fixes – some are on the sourceforge page and some are in the source repo.

I like duplicate emails in the way that everybody is thinking. This is different.

Due to a bug in offlineimap i hit a little while ago, it’s managed to make copies (sometimes even two copies) of each email in certain folders. Now, this isn’t so bad as

a) email didn’t get lost

b) it’s just using extra disk, and disk is cheap.

but it is annoying when searching.

It’s also annoying because it’s decided to do this on folders such as INBOX/MySQL/bugs which contains an email for each change to a bug report even since I joined the company. That adds up to a lot of wasted inodes and disk blocks.

So, I’ve revived this project that I have in the back of my head of efficiently storing email in a database and being able to sync between instances of it.

This gives us some nice advantages. you can use replication to keep a backup of your email. You can put it in Cluster and have high availability email.

We can also do some neat tricks with tables of all that info that you need to display lists of emails and probably get performance boosts instead of having to open each mail as we currently do. i.e. current email solutions don’t scale to a million emails in a folder.

Partitioning will also be useful to make searches quicker (odds are what we’re searching for is recent and all sorts of foo).

Anyway…. it’s interesting to see the bunch of errors that gets thrown up by the Mail::Box perl module on some of my Maildirs. Hrrm… I may have to resort to my own more error tolerant code. I’m determined to write scripts that can not possibly loose anything.

MySQL Users Conference 2006 – April 24-27, 2006 – Santa Clara, CA

I’m presenting “MySQL Cluster: New Features and Enhancements”. It’s going to be a riot. Lots of sexy new stuff to go on about. I’ll also be running a Cluster BoF and am really looking forward to chatting to people about Cluster and what we can do to make it better for our users.

So come along and talk to me while I’m there.

I’ll be sure to use the word “thongs” in the Australian sense as much as possible.

So come along, or I’ll be forced to ask “Where the bloody hell are ya?“