Fri 28 August 2026 | -- (permalink)

First update in over 10 years.

I wanted to revive this because I have some projects that I'm going to share and I wanted to put them up here.

I also wanted to start putting out some thoughts about software engineering.

I'm pretty skeptical of a lot of the hype …

Wed 24 September 2014 | -- (permalink)

Boston Data Con uploaded the video of my MPP talk to You Tube. The quality is really good. My thanks to everyone who put the conference together.

Sun 14 September 2014 | -- (permalink)

I gave a talk on Big Data and MPP Databases at Boston Data Con today. A couple of people asked for a copy of the slides. So I've put them up here MPP Slides. Please let me know if they are helpful for you.

Fri 04 July 2014 | -- (permalink)

Last year I did a project with some other developers where we looked at some volunteer data from a Boston area charity. We had a record for every occurrence of a volunteer attending an event over several years.

Here is a plot with a sample of some of the volunteers …

Tue 21 January 2014 | -- (permalink)

Did you know Greenplum doesn't support ENUMs? Apparently they were added to Postgres in 8.3 (right after Greenplum forked).

However you can create a domain to get some of the same behavior.

CREATE DOMAIN weather
VARCHAR(10) CHECK (VALUE IN ('rain', 'snow'));

You don't get the storage space benefits …

Sun 04 August 2013 | -- (permalink)

I finally got iTunes Home sharing working after WAY too many hours. I love apple but the one thing that drives me crazy is the "silent failure" where since "every thing just works" when it doesn't, there are no tools for debugging. In case this helps anyone here are some …

Tue 02 April 2013 | -- (permalink)

I'm doing an analysis of volunteer data and I set up an aws instance with Postgres to act as a database for the project.

I thought it might be helpful to document the steps I took to set this up.

1. Sign up for AWS, and login

I've been using …