Postgres 9.5 feature rundown | Hacker News Reader

Postgres 9.5 feature rundown

craigkerstiens.com

191 pointscraigkerstiens18 comments

Full list of "What's new in PostgreSQL 9.5" - https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_...

A lot of goodies around JSONB additions. In 9.4, there wasn't much support for updates to JSONB values, but now there will be some support for document-esque operations:

- jsonb || jsonb (concatenate / overwrite) : combine 2 jsonb objects and if there's overlap, values are replaced at the highest level

- jsonb - text / int (remove key / array element) : remove key or an array element

- jsonb #- text[] / int (remove key / array element in path) : remove key/array at path - jsonb_set function : update value at path

I have some concerns that overwriting keys at the highest level is always the correct behavior for "concatenating" JSONb documents. If you want to merge two keys, rather than overwrite one, you'll need to handle that at the application level.

Performing operations in the app is always an option, but it's often faster/simpler to do it in the DB, if it supports what you need. This feature is just one of these potential nice-to-haves.

I'll just add my voice to the chorus praising PostgreSQL. It's handled everything I've ever asked it to, and cheerfully.

I'm a bit sad that at my current job our problem set is much better suited for a distributed key-value store; I miss postgres, but it really is the wrong tool for this particular problem.

What kind of job market exists for people whose deepest area of knowledge is Postgres?

Edit: I'm thinking of more DBA type work and assisting with/contributing to drivers/wrappers.

Internal development or just usage/administration?

I've primarily been a Postgres DBA for the last decade or so, and have never had trouble finding work. As Postgres grows in popularity, people who know what they're doing with it are in increasing demand.

EDIT: I'm currently looking.

Start marketing yourself as "data engineering" and your prospects will widen.

The job market is pretty big.

Think of any "big data" company -- but moreso - think of anyone who is using Amazon Redshift for BI...

But really any company who can say they have "a data pipeline" will be a good candidate.

If you have very deep Postgres knowledge, then make sure you have strong ability to ferry data in and out of the DB esp. on AWS.

There are so many people who are looking to move data into and out of Redshift, RDS or other standalone systems. Any company who uses the term ETL will

Also - there will be a good number of people who want to migrate, at least in testing, from Postgres to Aurora (mysql based - but instance-less) -- so this will be a good skill.

I'd say that jsonb_set is far too interesting to not get mentioned here.

Since this is RC1 and stable version will be released pretty soon, when do you think Amazon RDS will support 9.5 (currently it supports 9.4.1)? Amazon didn't publish anything about that as far as I know, so this is more of a question about historical trends.

Rds will likely never support a .0 release, as .1 tends to be a quick bug release, and will probably try to get new versions out faster than it took 9.4.

So what kind of timeframe would you expect (after 9.5.0)? 3-6 months?

9.4.1 took 3 months after 9.4, assuming postgres releases the same, id guess on the lower range of 3-6 months

It's usually quicker - 9.4.1 was the "latest" .1 release for a long while. Roughly a month is quite common.

Is it out?

"There’s a few updates to JSONB. The one I’m most excited about is making JSONB output in psql read much more legibly."

This is good, but there's a link to other much more useful JSONB functions: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What's_new_in_PostgreSQL_9....

Almost. RC1 is out. The blog post said 9.5 will be out next year (January?) http://www.postgresql.org/

Barring release blockers discovered in RC1, yes, early January.

http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20706.1450460549@sss.pg...

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