Thread: All Wisconsin Circuit Courts now using PostgreSQL
Minutes ago we converted the last of our 72 Circuit Court databases (one in each county in the state) from a commercial databaseproduct to PostgreSQL. The conversions went smoothly, with many people commenting on their apprehensions and theirpleasant surprise that everything "just worked". We had many people comment on the improved performance. One Clerkof Court apologized for not knowing the right terminology, but said that everything was "just crisper and snappier." Due to the smooth roll-out and the stable functioning of the software under PostgreSQL, we were able to convince managementto let us accelerate the deployment. We have converted as many as eleven counties per week, finishing months aheadof the original schedule. One of my colleagues single-handedly converted six counties in a single evening within threehours of the user logging out. I would like to thank the entire PostgreSQL community for the helpful observations and suggestions as we learned how to workwith PostgreSQL. The PostgreSQL mailing lists are an invaluable resource, both as a searchable knowledge base and aset of live discussion forums. I apologize for those times when I've cluttered the lists with what I thought were PostgreSQLproblems, which turned out to be my own errors; I appreciate the nudges back toward reality. I hope that nobodywill take offense if I specifically recognize Tom Lane for his amazing combination of energy, technical acumen, andpatience. We couldn't have done it without you guys. The level and quality of help provided on the PostgreSQL mailing lists puts allother software support I've ever dealt with to shame, and I've been in the business now for 35 years. -Kevin
This is great to hear - glad you made it work, and happy to hear you've managed to get the best value from the community! I don't know exactly how much it'd take, but I would *love* to see this as a "proper case study" on our website. I know we already have a couple of quotes in the archive, but a complete case study would be even better. WOuld that be doable? //Magnus On Thu, Aug 30, 2007 at 06:24:28PM -0500, Kevin Grittner wrote: > Minutes ago we converted the last of our 72 Circuit Court databases (one in each county in the state) from a commercialdatabase product to PostgreSQL. The conversions went smoothly, with many people commenting on their apprehensionsand their pleasant surprise that everything "just worked". We had many people comment on the improved performance. One Clerk of Court apologized for not knowing the right terminology, but said that everything was "just crisperand snappier." > > Due to the smooth roll-out and the stable functioning of the software under PostgreSQL, we were able to convince managementto let us accelerate the deployment. We have converted as many as eleven counties per week, finishing months aheadof the original schedule. One of my colleagues single-handedly converted six counties in a single evening within threehours of the user logging out. > > I would like to thank the entire PostgreSQL community for the helpful observations and suggestions as we learned how towork with PostgreSQL. The PostgreSQL mailing lists are an invaluable resource, both as a searchable knowledge base anda set of live discussion forums. I apologize for those times when I've cluttered the lists with what I thought were PostgreSQLproblems, which turned out to be my own errors; I appreciate the nudges back toward reality. I hope that nobodywill take offense if I specifically recognize Tom Lane for his amazing combination of energy, technical acumen, andpatience. > > We couldn't have done it without you guys. The level and quality of help provided on the PostgreSQL mailing lists putsall other software support I've ever dealt with to shame, and I've been in the business now for 35 years. > > -Kevin > > > > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? > > http://archives.postgresql.org
>>> On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 5:39 AM, in message <20070831103900.GQ14845@svr2.hagander.net>, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote: > I don't know exactly how much it'd take, but I would *love* to see this as > a "proper case study" on our website. I know we already have a couple of > quotes in the archive, but a complete case study would be even better. > WOuld that be doable? I'll poke around and see what other case studies look like. I'm pretty sure management would not approve it as "on the clock" work, but if the effort is within reasonable bounds, I'll do it on my own time. Our situation is going to be pretty atypical, though, because we have our own framework for development and production, and when we needed to redo it, management asked that we do whatever we felt necessary to make the new version independent of both the back end database and the OS. With that framework we may have had an easier time moving to a new database product than many will. -Kevin
Excerpts from Kevin Grittner's message of vie ago 31 17:23:20 -0400 2007: > > I don't know exactly how much it'd take, but I would *love* to see this as > > a "proper case study" on our website. I know we already have a couple of > > quotes in the archive, but a complete case study would be even better. > > WOuld that be doable? > > I'll poke around and see what other case studies look like. I'm pretty sure > management would not approve it as "on the clock" work, but if the effort is > within reasonable bounds, I'll do it on my own time. Hi Kevin, Did you ever release some sort of case study for the Wisconsin courts database system? Pointers to anything you have would be very much appreciated. -- Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc. PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support
Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> wrote: > Excerpts from Kevin Grittner's message of vie ago 31 17:23:20 -0400 2007: > >>> I don't know exactly how much it'd take, but I would *love* to >>> see this as a "proper case study" on our website. I know we >>> already have a couple of quotes in the archive, but a complete >>> case study would be even better. WOuld that be doable? >> >> I'll poke around and see what other case studies look like. I'm >> pretty sure management would not approve it as "on the clock" >> work, but if the effort is within reasonable bounds, I'll do it >> on my own time. > Did you ever release some sort of case study for the Wisconsin > courts database system? Pointers to anything you have would be > very much appreciated. No, I never got comfortable with what format to use, but I *did* do a presentation at PGCon 2009, with slides. http://www.pgcon.org/2009/schedule/events/129.en.html The big news since then is that we decided that if we could find a solution to the serializable versus snapshot isolation issues, we could commit to PostgreSQL for the long term. This led to the SSI effort, and with the acceptance of that patch, we moved forward with converting all of the triggers and many of the "stored procedures" (1900 in total) which had been running on our Java tier just above the database into PostgreSQL plpgsql functions. This required some minor hacking on PostgreSQL core which we are currently "forking", but has been surprisingly painless. (Again, the "product-neutral" ANSI SQL format we used, allowed us to parse existing code and walk the AST to generate PostgreSQL function source code -- but that's its last gasp; we're maintaining it in plpgsql going forward.) I submitted some of the hacks from this latest phase to the first CF for 9.2, and got significant interest and good feedback, but haven't found the round tuits to follow up on getting these out to the community with the requested changes. All except the "trigger depth" patch could and should be done as extensions, now that we have a mature facility for that. Whether any of those extensions belong in core is probably going to be a matter of some debate; I think the "triggered change notification" showed enough interest (on and off list) that it might belong. -Kevin