A release candidate for the newest version of Postgres was shipped this week. For me personally, the difference with this release is not that drastic compared to those new features added on 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2 which marked a new era, not just for Postgres, but for all RDBMS, especially now in the NoSQL hype. Heck, some of the features, like LISTEN/NOTIFY publish notification on events, are still missing from most of the so-called high-performance key-value or document datastores.

What I admire most about the Postgres community is its ability to develop on different features and not just focus on what some BDFL think is an important goal. Thus, changes in the new version, as well as always, occurred on all fronts: SQL semantics, special datatypes features, view-related features, replication and administration.

JSON

The 9.2 version saw the addition of JSON datatype, perceived to give great boost to schema-less data usage of Postgres. Of course, we could[. . .]

I was trying to build an in-database recommendation system using collaborative filtering and postgresql was appealing because its support of array types. But quickly I found myself in need of even basic linear algebra functions, and I only needed summation (both in-line and aggregate), scalar multiplication as well as dot product. I did these in pl/python just to see if my concept was working (it was!), but, as you can guess, it was quite slow.

A quick search revealed MADlib, an extension that can do a lot more than basic linear algebra. It also does descriptive and inferential statistics, linear and logistic regression, k-means clustering and a lot more.

You can check the code on github, and there is a rpm binary package for CentOS. (I work on arch linux, so I just needed to extract the package with rpmextract and then copy it to my root.) After installation, look for the bin/madpack binary for deployment to[. . .]