21 August 2014: 2ndQuadrant is proud to announce the release of version 1.3.3 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL.

This major release improves robustness of both backup procedures and their monitoring, by introducing:

• the so-called "smelly backup" control, allowing DBAs to detect possible problems in scheduling of periodical backups, by receiving complaints by "barman check" when the latest available backup for a server is older than a specified timeframe
• management of retry attempts for base backup copy (for both "barman backup" and "barman recover" commands), making the operation more resilient to temporary issues such as network connection drops

Performance issues have been fixed in relation to remote recovery over existing directories (incremental recovery), by invoking checksum control only when strictly necessary.

Usability has been enhanced through better exception handling, output and logging messages. PostgreSQL 8.3 is also now supported.

The following major bugs have been fixed:

• Copies "recovery.conf" during remote "barman recover" (#43)
• Correctly detect pre/post archive hook scripts (#41)

Minor bugs have also been fixed.

Many thanks for funding towards the development of this release go to Agile Business Group (www.agilebg.com), Jobrapido (www.jobrapido.com), Navionics (www.navionics.com), and Subito.it (www.subito.it).

For a complete list of changes, see the "Release Notes" section below.

Links

• Website: http://www.pgbarman.org/
• Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/
• Documentation: http://www.pgbarman.org/documentation/
• Support: http://www.pgbarman.org/support/
• pgespresso extension: https://github.com/2ndquadrant-it/pgespresso

Release notes

• Added "last_backup_max_age", a new global/server option that allows administrators to set the max age of the last backup in a catalogue, making it easier to detect any issues with periodical backup execution
• Improved robustness of "barman backup" by introducing two global/server options: "basebackup_retry_times" and "basebackup_retry_sleep". These options allow an administrator to specify, respectively, the number of attempts for a copy operation after a failure, and the number of seconds of wait before retrying
• Improved the recovery process via rsync on an existing directory (incremental recovery), by splitting the previous rsync call into several ones - invoking checksum control only when necessary
• Added support for PostgreSQL 8.3
• Minor changes:
  • Support for comma separated list values configuration options
  • Improved backup durability by calling fsync() on backup and WAL files during "barman backup" and "barman cron"
  • Improved Nagios output for "barman check --nagios"
  • Display compression ratio for WALs in "barman show-backup"
  • Correctly handled keyboard interruption (CTRL-C) while performing barman backup
  • Improved error messages of failures regarding the stop of a backup
  • Wider coverage of unit tests
• Bug fixes:
  • Copies "recovery.conf" on the remote server during "barman recover" (#43)
  • Correctly detect pre/post archive hook scripts (#41)

Download

• Release Notes: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/
• Sources: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/barman-1.3.3.tar.gz/download
• RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 5: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/barman-1.3.3-1.rhel5.noarch.rpm/download (dependencies: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/rhel5-deps/)
• RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 6: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/barman-1.3.3-1.rhel6.noarch.rpm/download (dependencies: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/rhel6-deps/)
• PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/barman/1.3.3
• pgespresso on PostgreSQL Extension framework (PGXN): http://pgxn.org/dist/pgespresso/
• pgespresso RPM/Debian packages: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/pgespresso/
• Online documentation: http://www.pgbarman.org/documentation
• PDF documentation: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/barman-tutorial.en.pdf/download

About Barman

Barman (Backup and Recovery Manager) is an open source administration tool for disaster recovery of PostgreSQL servers written in Python. It allows your organisation to perform remote backups of multiple servers in business critical environments and help DBAs during the recovery phase. Barman’s most requested features include backup catalogues, retention policies, remote backup and recovery, archiving and compression of WAL files and backups. Barman is distributed under GNU GPL 3.

REDMOND, Wash. — Aug. 21 , 201 4 — Microsoft Corp. and TracFone Wireless on Thursday announced a collaboration that will bring the benefits of smartphone technology and services to underserved and high-risk populations through a new mobile health management solution offered through providers and insurers. This approach expands on Microsoft’s commitment to healthcare and TracFone’s telecommunications expertise as the largest Lifeline provider and prepaid wireless leader. Microsoft and TracFone will work with Health Choice Network (HCN), a Miami-based company that manages and connects a network of community health centers with more than 760,000 patients in 17 states, to conduct a pilot project where HCN will provide smartphones to diabetes patients to help them better manage their care.

Building on the success of TracFone’s short message service, text and phone programs, the new solution will be offered on a Windows Phone and feature Microsoft’s familiar suite of services and solutions, such as Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft HealthVault, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and a variety of smartphone applications. It will combine enterprise-grade security and privacy features to allow security-enhanced, HIPAA-enabled email and messaging communications to patients regarding their health and regimens. In addition, it will provide appointment reminders with calendar functionality and remote device management that is standard with a Windows Phone.

“Putting existing technologies to use for today’s patients will help improve healthcare, coordination and outcomes, as well as better manage costs,” said Lee Stevens, director of Health Information Exchange Policy and Interoperability, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “Combining the power of a smartphone with a personal health record platform that brings disparate data together in a secure environment is an important step toward the goal of providing better patient engagement and more mobile healthcare in the U.S.”

Windows Phone already has built-in enterprise-grade safety and security features, as well as the ability to offer security-enhanced, HIPAA-enabled communications through Office 365. These features help patients, health providers and insurers retain control over important personal health information.

“With over 500,000 subscribers through SafeLink Health Solutions, we have seen firsthand the benefits of technology and the association between great health and a better quality of life,” said F.J. Pollak, president and CEO, TracFone. “We are excited to begin this program with Microsoft and HCN by bringing this innovative solution to market and helping our customers achieve their healthcare goals.”

Patients participating in the HCN pilot will receive a Windows Phone with TracFone’s prepaid services that will help them improve their engagement and manage their disease. The pilot’s goal is to demonstrate how access to mobile technology can help improve patient compliance, education and ultimately disease-related outcomes. HCN will develop a customer application to help participants provide consent, deliver and receive reminders, ensure treatment plan understanding, and aid in disease self-tracking for blood sugar levels and other vital health information. Patients will also have access to a variety of apps, including several that are specific to diabetes care, and other mobile devices connected to HealthVault to ensure the personal health records are pulling information from any devices they regularly use to help monitor important health information.

Because the solution will also be running on the Windows Phone 8.1 operating system, the mobile health solution will benefit from emerging Microsoft technologies such as Cortana personal assistant, which can help set reminders based on time, location, individual habits and preferences. For example, Cortana can remind patients to fill a prescription the next time it senses that they are near the pharmacy, or it can remind them to talk to a doctor about a specific concern the next time a doctor’s call or email is received.

“For several years, our patients with chronic health conditions like diabetes have benefited from access to their personal health record in HealthVault,” said Kevin Kearns, president and CEO, HCN. “We are excited to include a mobile smartphone to extend the platform for patient engagement and enhance our ability to provide, connect and utilize the tools to drive better outcomes. This is particularly timely as we focus on the tremendous growth in the Medicaid and individual market, whose enrollees traditionally are at higher risk for chronic disease and benefit most from patient engagement.”

“This solution brings together the strength of Microsoft's comprehensive platform and productivity tools in an evolving mobile-first, cloud-first world,” said Michael Robinson, vice president, U.S. Health and Life Sciences, Microsoft. “Combined with TracFone’s strong presence in the Lifeline mobile marketplace, we have a unique opportunity to provide our joint insurer, provider and Medicaid agency customers with the platform and tools to enhance patient engagement and meet the requirements necessary to succeed in today’s healthcare marketplace.”

More information is available at http://www.microsoft.com/healthplans, http://www.microsoft.com/hhs, this Mobile Health Management Solution data sheet and the Microsoft in Health Newsroom.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services, devices and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.

DALIBO is proud to present the first release of POWA, a brand new performance tool for PostgreSQL.

Realtime traffic analysis and dynamic graphs

POWA is a workload analyzer that gives a clear view of the current activity of your PostgreSQL servers with a query runtime graph and a block hit/read graph along with a chart of time consuming request over the specified time period.

If you zoom anywhere in one of the graphs, the chart will adjust and show you which queries were running at that time. If you click on a specific query, you will get additional graphs such as read/write time, number of rows affected, local and shared hit, etc.

A bunch of PL functions are also available to access and manage the stats.

Extending pg_stat_statements

Basically PoWA is a PostgreSQL extension designed to historize information given by the pg_stat_statements extension. It provides SQL SRF to gather useful information on a specified time interval.

This first release is ready for production but of course we will continue to improve it. Please install it (or test our demo site) and let's us know what you think of it. Right now what we need most is feedback and new ideas, especially to improve the user experience and the graphic interface...

PoWA is available under the PostgreSQL license. The main code is a PostgreSQL extension written in C and SQL. The user interface is based on Perl and Mojolicious. Obviously the stats are stored in a PostgreSQL database :-)

For the complete list of changes, please checkout the release note on https://github.com/dalibo/powa/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Credits

DALIBO would like to thank all the developers who contributed to this release, especially : Marc Cousin for the original idea and Julien Rouhaud for the hard work on the GUI.

POWA is an open project available under the PostgreSQL License. Any contribution to build a better tool is welcome. You just have to send your ideas, features requests or patches using the GitHub tools or directly to powa@dalibo.com

Links :

• Download : http://dalibo.github.io/powa/
• Demo : http://demo-powa.dalibo.com (login/pass = powa/demo)

About POWA :

PoWA is PostgreSQL Workload Analyzer that gathers performance stats and provides real-time charts and graph to help monitor and tune your PostgreSQL servers. It is similar to Oracle AWR or SQL Server MDW.

Code & Demo at http://dalibo.github.io/powa/

About DALIBO :

DALIBO is the leading PostgreSQL company in France, providing support, trainings and consulting to its customers since 2005. The company contributes to the PostgreSQL community in various ways, including : code, articles, translations, free conferences and workshops

Check out DALIBO's open source projects at http://dalibo.github.io

http://www.dalibo.com

Dear Satya,

As I approach the six month mark of my retirement and your appointment as CEO, I have been reflecting on my life, my ongoing ownership of Microsoft stock, and my involvement with the company. I have reached some conclusions and wanted to share them with you. I know August is the key month during which the company starts to prepare the proxy statement for the next shareholders’ meeting, and so these thoughts are probably timely for that too.

First, Microsoft has been my life’s work and I am proud of that and excited by what I see in front of the company and this leadership team. There are challenges ahead but the opportunities are even larger. No company in the world has the mix of software skills, cloud skills, and hardware skills we have assembled. We draw talent as well as any company in the world. We have the profitability to invest in long-term opportunities and still deliver superior shorter term performance. You’re off to a bold and exciting start.

Microsoft will need to be bold and make big bets to succeed in this new environment. Writing great software is a tremendous accomplishment and selling software has been a fabulous business. In the mobile-first, cloud-first world, software development is a key skill, but success requires moving to monetization through enterprise subscriptions, hardware gross margins, and advertising revenues. Making that change while also managing the existing software business well requires a boldness and fearlessness that I believe the management team has. Our board must also support and encourage that fearlessness for shareholders to get the best performance from Microsoft. You must drive that.

I had not spent any time really contemplating my post-Microsoft life until my last day with the company. In the six months since leaving, I have become very busy. I see a combination of the Clippers, civic contribution, teaching and study taking a lot of time. I have confidence in our approach of mobile-first, cloud-first, and in our primary innovation emphasis on platforms and productivity and the building of capability in devices and services as core business drivers. I hold more Microsoft shares than anyone other than index funds and love the mix of profits, investments and dividends returned in our stock. I expect to continue holding that position for the foreseeable future.

Given my confidence and the multitude of new commitments I am taking on now, I think it would be impractical for me to continue to serve on the board, and it is best for me to move off. The fall will be hectic between teaching a new class and the start of the NBA season so my departure from the board is effective immediately.

I bleed Microsoft — have for 34 years and I always will. I continue to love discussing the company’s future. I love trying new products and sending feedback. I love reading about what is going on at the company. Count on me to keep ideas and inputs flowing. The company will move to higher heights. I will be proud, and I will benefit through my share ownership. I promise to support and encourage boldness by management in my role as a shareholder in any way I can.

All the best,

Steve

Satya Nadella response to Steve Ballmer

Steve,

First, thank you for all of your support during my transition this year and for the past 34 years. It’s been a great privilege to have worked with you and learned from you. Under your leadership, we created an incredible foundation that we continue to build on — and Microsoft will thrive in the mobile-first, cloud-first world.

While your insights and leadership will be greatly missed as part of the board, I understand and support your decision.

As you embark on your new journey, I am sure that you will bring the same boldness, passion and impact to your new endeavors that you brought to Microsoft, and we wish you incredible success. I also look forward to partnering with you as a shareholder.

On behalf of all of Microsoft and the Board of Directors, thank you.

Satya

Version 3.4.0 of DBD::Pg, the Perl driver for Postgres, has been released: http://search.cpan.org/dist/DBD-Pg/

This version greatly enhanced the table_info() and column_info() methods.