Thread: Returning to Postgres community work

Hi All,

     I'm very happy to announce that I now work for Supabase [1]. They
have hired me so that I can participate in, and contribute to the
Postgres community.

    I'm announcing it here in the hopes that more companies feel
encouraged to contribute to Postgres. For those who don't know my past
work and involvement in the Postgres community, please see the
'PostgreSQL RDBMS' section in my resume [2] (on page 4).

    I'm deeply indebted to Supabase for giving me this opportunity to
work with, and for the Postgres community.

    Following is the statement by Paul (CEO) and Anthony (CTO), the
co-founders of Supabase:

    Supabase is a PostgreSQL hosting service that makes PostgreSQL
incredibly easy to use. Since our inception in 2020 we've benefited
hugely from the work of the PostgreSQL community.

    We've been long-time advocates of PostgreSQL, and we're now in a
position to contribute back in a tangible way. We're hiring Gurjeet
with the explicit goal of working on PostgreSQL community
contributions. We're excited to welcome Gurjeet to the team at
Supabase.

[1]: https://supabase.io/
[2]: https://gurjeet.singh.im/GurjeetResume.pdf

PS: Hacker News announcement is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=

Best regards,
--
Gurjeet Singh http://gurjeet.singh.im/

On Mon, Aug 30, 2021 at 10:53 PM Gurjeet Singh <gurjeet@singh.im> wrote:

> PS: Hacker News announcement is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28364406

Best regards,
--
Gurjeet Singh http://gurjeet.singh.im/

On 8/31/21 1:53 AM, Gurjeet Singh wrote:
>       I'm very happy to announce that I now work for Supabase [1]. They
> have hired me so that I can participate in, and contribute to the
> Postgres community.

Welcome back! :-)

Joe

-- 
Crunchy Data - http://crunchydata.com
PostgreSQL Support for Secure Enterprises
Consulting, Training, & Open Source Development

On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 8:04 AM Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> wrote:
>
> On 2021-Aug-30, Gurjeet Singh wrote:
>
> >      I'm very happy to announce that I now work for Supabase [1]. They
> > have hired me so that I can participate in, and contribute to the
> > Postgres community.
>
> Hey Gurjeet, welcome back.  Glad to hear you've found a good spot.

Thank you!

> You know what I've heard?  That your index advisor module languishes
> unmaintained and that there's no shortage of people wishing to use it.

Now there's a masterclass in making someone feel great and guilty in
the same sentence ;-)

> Heck, we spent a lot of back-and-forth in the spanish mailing list
> with somebody building a super obsolete version of Postgres just so that
> they could compile your index advisor.  I dunno, if you have some spare
> time, maybe updating that one would be a valuable contribution from
> users' perspective.

Aye-aye Capn' :-)

EDB folks reached out to me a few months ago to assign a license to
the project, which I did and it is now a Postgres-licensed project
[1].

Given the above, it is safe to assume that this tool is at least being
maintained by EDB, at least internally for their customers. I would
request them to contribute the changes back in the open.

Regardless of that, please rest assured that I will work on making it
compatible with the current supported versions of Postgres. Lack of
time is not an excuse anymore :-)

Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

[1]: https://github.com/gurjeet/pg_adviser/blob/master/LICENSE

Best regards,
--
Gurjeet Singh http://gurjeet.singh.im/

On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 11:24 AM Gurjeet Singh <gurjeet@singh.im> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
>      I'm very happy to announce that I now work for Supabase [1]. They
> have hired me so that I can participate in, and contribute to the
> Postgres community.
>

Congratulations! Glad to hear this news.

-- 
With Regards,
Amit Kapila.

On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 1:02 AM Gurjeet Singh <gurjeet@singh.im> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 8:04 AM Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> wrote:
> >
> > You know what I've heard?  That your index advisor module languishes
> > unmaintained and that there's no shortage of people wishing to use it.
>
> Now there's a masterclass in making someone feel great and guilty in
> the same sentence ;-)
>
> > Heck, we spent a lot of back-and-forth in the spanish mailing list
> > with somebody building a super obsolete version of Postgres just so that
> > they could compile your index advisor.  I dunno, if you have some spare
> > time, maybe updating that one would be a valuable contribution from
> > users' perspective.
>
> Aye-aye Capn' :-)
>
> EDB folks reached out to me a few months ago to assign a license to
> the project, which I did and it is now a Postgres-licensed project
> [1].
>
> Given the above, it is safe to assume that this tool is at least being
> maintained by EDB, at least internally for their customers. I would
> request them to contribute the changes back in the open.
>
> Regardless of that, please rest assured that I will work on making it
> compatible with the current supported versions of Postgres. Lack of
> time is not an excuse anymore :-)

For the record we created an index adviser, which can be used either
with powa user interface (which requires a bit more effort to setup
but gives a lot of additional performance info) or a standalone one in
SQL using only pg_qualstats exension.

Unlike most advisers it's using the predicates sampled from the actual
workload rather than with a per-single-query basis to come up with its
suggestion.  As a result it can give better results as it can e.g.
suggest multi-column indexes to optimize multiple queries at once
rather than suggesting multiple partially redundant indexes for each
query.  The UI version can also check all the suggested indexes using
hypopg to verify if they're sensible and also give a rough idea on how
much the queries can benefit from it.  You can see a naive example at
[1].

Note that this is compatible with all postgres version down to 9.4.

[1]: https://powa.readthedocs.io/en/latest/_images/hypopg_db1.png

On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 10:02 AM Gurjeet Singh <gurjeet@singh.im> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 8:04 AM Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> wrote:
>
> > You know what I've heard?  That your index advisor module languishes
> > unmaintained and that there's no shortage of people wishing to use it.
>
> Now there's a masterclass in making someone feel great and guilty in
> the same sentence ;-)
>
> > Heck, we spent a lot of back-and-forth in the spanish mailing list
> > with somebody building a super obsolete version of Postgres just so that
> > they could compile your index advisor.  I dunno, if you have some spare
> > time, maybe updating that one would be a valuable contribution from
> > users' perspective.
>
> Aye-aye Capn' :-)

As part of helping the GSoC contributor getting onboard (see below), I
went through a similar process and had to figure out the Postgres
version, system packages, etc. (all ancient) that were needed to build
and use it. It's no fun having to deal with software from over a
decade ago :-(

> EDB folks reached out to me a few months ago to assign a license to
> the project, which I did and it is now a Postgres-licensed project
> [1].
>
> Given the above, it is safe to assume that this tool is at least being
> maintained by EDB, at least internally for their customers. I would
> request them to contribute the changes back in the open.

After over a year of conversations and follow-ups, a couple of months
ago EnterpriseDB finally made it clear that they won't be contributing
their changes back to the open-source version of Index Advisor. With
that avenue now closed, we can now freely pursue

> Regardless of that, please rest assured that I will work on making it
> compatible with the current supported versions of Postgres. Lack of
> time is not an excuse anymore :-)

Oh, how wrong was I :-)

I have a few updates on the current state and plans around the Index
Adviser extension.

I proposed Index Adviser as a potential project for GSoC 2023 [1].
Ahmed (CCd) has signed up as the contributor. The project has now been
accepted/funded by GSoC. The primary goal of the project is to support
all the active versions of Postgres. The extended goal is to support
additional index types. The extension currently supports Postgres
version 8.3, and BTree index type.

[1]: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/GSoC_2023#pg_adviser_.2F_index_adviser:_Recommend_Potentially_Useful_Indexes

Best regards,
Gurjeet
http://Gurje.et