Help with getting reliable database writes

First today is a PostgreSQL community blogger note. Those of you who publish to the Planet PostgreSQL blog feed should take a look at the updated Planet PostgreSQL Policy. There’s a new clause there clarifying when it’s appropriate to mention promotions of commercial products like books. We’re trying to keep every blog post to the Planet feed focused on providing useful information, and just informing people of things like product giveaways doesn’t meet that standard. Several of these have gone by recently, but moving forward that will be considered a violation of the rules.

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Disks for Databases: 3rd Gen Seagate Hybrid Drive

Seagate’s new third generation hybrid drive combines 8GB of MLC NAND SSD with a 1TB mechanical drive spinning at 5400RPM. They’re using the term solid state hybrid drive or SSHD for the product line. The big advance of these second generation hybrid drives is that the cache can be used for writes, and that write cache is protected by capacitors. It is supposed to shut down cleanly when the power dies.

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Launching a career in bikeshed painting

In March I’ll pass six years since I first submitted a feature change to PostgreSQL.  Numbers and years shouldn’t mean that much to people, but try and tell that to anyone who’s ever forgotten about their anniversary.  The fifth anniversary is traditionally celebrated with gifts made of wood.  I think I’ll use mine to build a bikeshed, a tradition in software development going back to at least 1956.  My guess is that minutes after the first person built storage that held one bit of information, someone questioned not the logic they used to flip its state, but instead whether the soldering technique used to wire it on would last.

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