Archive for the ‘Computers are fun’ Category

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Cleaning up pg_attribute bloat

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Around a year ago we made some big changes to the ETL process in our Oncology data warehouse.  The change allowed us to greatly reduce bloat in the data warehouse indexes and tables.  The only problem, this system uses lots and lots and lots of temp tables.  The result of this, we are now bloating the PostgreSQL catalog table pg_catalog.pg_class a substantial amount.  Fortunately the community was a great help and some e-mails on the PostgesSQL e-mail list pointed to a solution.

The simple solution I decided to take, just put this into a nightly cron job:

VACUUM FULL  pg_catalog.pg_class;


REINDEX TABLE pg_catalog.pg_class;


Now pg_attribute could not be cleaner, I love simple solutions. 

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Posted in Computers are fun, PostgreSQL | No Comments »

iSCSI SAN Suggestions

Friday, March 6th, 2009

We are facing an immediate need to refresh and expand some of our iSCSI storage we are running our PostgreSQL instance on. I am open to just about anything but I wondered if this group would have any suggestions. One item that is a bit unique to our situation is I am not in the need of staggering performance as I am in the need for very cost effective large mounts of storage. For more details on what I am doing: http://www.slideshare.net/AaronThul/this-is-your-postgresql-on-drugs

At the moment I am looking at Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems or a Dell Equallogic. Would anyone like to suggest other options? Has anyone had any problems with those vendors? Anyone like to share a glowing review or success story?

Posted in Computers are fun, PostgreSQL | No Comments »

Hit the road Itunes

Saturday, December 6th, 2008

I have been at FOSSCamp for the last two days learning about all kinds of great FOSS.  One outstanding piece of software that Jorge showed me was Songbird.  After five minutes of playing with it I could not contain my excitement. Jorge told me to pause my excitement and pulled me into a room to meet Stephen Lau, a Songbird developer.  Apparently I made an impression once my enthusiasm was unpaused and Stephen blogged about the incident that you are able to read below or the full post here.

At the end of that session Jorge brought a few folks over who had just installed Songbird for the first time who had some really great praise and comments for us. It’s super gratifying to have someone come up who has just installed Songbird for the first time and gets it… especially having worked so hard on it for the past year. We got lots of warm praise and supportive words for getting Songbird into Ubuntu’s repositories.

Songbird first impressed me with Itunes library import.  It pulled over all my music, playlists, music rating, and more.  Then it offered to keep my misic in sync with what ever I put into my Itunes library.  Next it knocked my socks off with features like concerts, last.fm album art, song lyrics, & SHOUTcast support.  The application just works and offers me more then Itunes ever has.  I don’t think I have a reason to launch Itunes ever again so it can just hit the road.

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Posted in Computers are fun | 1 Comment »

We are back

Friday, July 18th, 2008

After some unfortunate down time this site is back online.  Thank you to all the people who brought the error to my attention.

This time the site being down was not my fault:

    Hello,

    One of the fileserers that your machines are mounted to blew a drive. Our Admins have resolved the matter. All services (web, mail, etc. ) are fully funtional. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused and appreciate your patience. If you have any additional questions, please let us know.

           Thanks

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Anyone know of a good laptop stand?

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

My fist two weeks with the laptop have been a real joy.  Normally I spend days setting up a new system but I was able to transfer everything including installed programs from my Imac over to my MacBook Pro.  I REALLY like how apple does this and I wish that every system let you move installed applications so easily. I bet it saved me 45+ hours of work, this is why I am now Steve Jobs fanboy.  

When at my house I connect my laptop to my apple display and use a bluetooth key board and mouse.  I love the setup but recently some called to attention one ‘problem’ with it.  I wanted to have the laptop the same height as the screen so when I looked around my den I grabbed the fist thing I had that was the desired height.

Macbook Pro Desk SetupI

I have not used my copy of Office XP Developer in some time due to the fact I purchased Office 2008 for the mac.  I love it when I am able to reuse something however it is a bit of an eye sore compared to the rest of the setup.   Does anyone know of a good laptop stand that is frugal?  I just spend all my play money on a new laptop to I have to be price conscious.  If you do know of one drop me a e-mail or leave a comment on the blog please.  

Posted in Apple, Computers are fun | 7 Comments »

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