Alan Turing's Legacy

It's Alan Turing's 100th Anniversary today.

Interesting for me, since I live near Bletchley Park where he worked during the war. I recommend a visit there, its becoming something of a tourist attraction now after years of obscurity.

Born out of the needs of that war, Turing laid the ground work for both modern computation and cryptanalysis. Many other people helped that effort and have been forgotten, something not helped by people re-writing history in films like U-571 and other sensationalist material.

Originally, computers had just one use - mathematical computation. We might think he foresaw many things, but I don't think he even dreamed of the worlds of databases or graphics. The level and complexity of "persistent computing" we now have in PostgreSQL would astound him, though he'd probably not make the distinction between the different layers of software and hardware that we do, only see the whole system working together as being amazing.

I like to think he'd be impressed with what we've done, but I'm also thinking he might observe how much more there is yet to achieve.

On a related note, I saw something that pointed out that Blade Runner predicted flying cars yet all the cops did with them was land next to a static payphone. I guess imagining mobile phones was a stretch too far. Yet we have the mobile phones, but not the flying cars.

Predicting the future is easy. Building it is harder and slower than we like; funding the future is the hardest part.  Turing would have done nothing without a budget, and sheer persistence.

Replication Test Servers

As various people have already noted, IBM has set up some servers that will allow us to test software for robustness and performance and have kindly donated those to us for project use. Thanks very much to Mark Wong for arranging that as well as various IBM folk for assistance.

The general plan is for Rob Haas to get access to one server for performance testing, while I have access to 3 smaller virtual servers for testing replication. It's a pretty rough plan as yet and full access is still being fully configured.

This is good because it will allow us access right at the start of PostgreSQL 9.3 development cycle.

I'll post again when we've finished the 9.2 CommitFest and have had the chance to set these up in a useful way.

R is for Innovation

I'm pleased to note that Teradata just announced a plugin for the R language.

As many of you will know, PostgreSQL has supported server functions written in the R language for many years. So its good that Teradata has seen the light at last and by doing so has validated the innovations that PostgreSQL has made.

That means the list of databases that have responded directly to innovations in PostgreSQL, now extends to Oracle, Informix(Illustra), SQLServer, Sybase, DB2, Teradata. Of course, MySQL have been trying to catch up for a long time,

That pretty much is the complete set. Cool. Well, almost.

I'm intrigued as to what NoSQL vendors think will happen next. If their core values are simplicity then what new features can they add without going back on their core philosophy. Austerity isn't something you can have more of, is it? Let's wait and see what happens when the VC runs out.

PostgreSQL really is in a leadership position with regards to database innovation. And I'm happier than ever to be part of this phenomenon.

Cascading Replication

Cascading Replication is now part of PostgreSQL 9.2, thanks to Fujii Masao.

The idea is that a streaming replication standby can also stream data onto other standbys. This allows a complex network of interrelated servers to fulfil the roles of High Availability, High Durability, Distributed data access capacity and Reporting requirements.

You can set up chained configurations like A -> B -> C.

or more complex arrangements like
......A
....B....E
..C.D...F.G

This should make it much easier to reduce bandwidth for intercontinental replication.

Nice thing is that Hot Standby feedback works across the whole cluster, so you easily manage the interrelationships between servers.