iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 07/05/2025

The details matter. In this case, completely revamping our newsletter signup screen ahead of an upcoming conference. I mean why wouldn't you execute SQL to sign up for a database newsletter?

181

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 22/04/2025

@andypavlo.bsky.social on HN sums it up well OLAP vs. OLTP isn't right vs. wrong, they're designed for different things. Have a version of this on a slide when explaining Crunchy Data Warehouse and how it's for very different purposes than stock Postgres.

291

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 22/04/2025

🐘 meets 🧊 End to end, under 2 minutes. - Two commands to replicate data from Postgres -> Iceberg - Synced over 10m rows under a minute - Data is continually processed and updated in Iceberg - count(*) in Postgres over 300ms down to under 20ms

030

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 08/04/2025

What's this? Flexible/variable long term backup retention 👀

150

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 04/04/2025

Once you get the basic concepts a lot of power is suddenly unlocked.

020

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 27/03/2025

I've encountered a database without constraints that "enforces them within the app" I've encountered data quality issues. Postgres has a variety of constraints to help, not just primary/unique and foreign keys, but also not null and check constraints.

2132

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 26/03/2025

Something I've always found pride in is making developer tooling more accessible. You won't find many that think Postgres isn't powerful, but navigating it can be overwhelming. Scheduled jobs in a database aren't a "new thing", pg_cron has long been around but it wasn't always "friendly".

130

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 25/03/2025

Partitioning in Postgres is great if you've got any form of time series data. It can allow higher ingest, faster queries, and easily archiving old data. Common examples could be: - logs - events - metrics

230

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 21/03/2025

Can you guess when we moved internal logging from cloudwatch over to S3/Iceberg via Crunchy Data Warehouse?

170

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 17/03/2025

Spent a little time this weekend working on some temporary tattoos for the kids. Very curious to see what they end up thinking of them.

020

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 14/03/2025

What you're vendor tells you doesn't *always* align with reality, it aligns with their incentives. This aligns with what I've seen that typically "vanilla" RDS is often an improvement over Aurora.

171

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 27/02/2025

A big part of building Crunchy Data Warehouse was ease of use. How easy is it to load data from existing public datasets? Step 1: Point at your dataset and we'll load it for you Step 2: Query it Step 3: Profit

051

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 29/01/2025

Are PMs folks that can actually get things done?

140

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 11/01/2025

Picked up a few solid bottles today

1120

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 08/01/2025

In addition to usual butcher box picked up some bones as extra. Beef stock for (maybe) the month

020

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 30/12/2024

Feedback from users can be rare, especially when you lose a customer. Take pride in your work and run a good service, and hope one day for users like this. (Context: Their side project shut down, and they sent a personal note saying sorry they're no longer a customer).

030

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 27/12/2024

If you're brand is be informative and helpful. You literally print stickers that contain Postgres tips on them.

0151

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 16/12/2024

A while back we added a command palette to Crunchy Bridge (⌘ + K and get a set of shortcuts that you could easily navigate by typing). I personally love and use it all the time! BUT, most of our users don't log in every day. So we exposed it directly in the nav to make it easy to find.

070

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 14/12/2024

At movie theatre power went out, unsure if they’ll be able to play movie they make announcement about it. Kid says can we start the movie back. I ask if he was listening. Apparently he meant this movie

030

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 12/12/2024

Not a fruit, but availability of fun produce in this area is so great

140

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 09/12/2024

Weekends are for broths and stock

0110

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 05/12/2024

CREATE TABLE measurements_staging (like measurements); INSERT INTO measurements_staging VALUES ('Charleston', 21.3); WITH new_rows as ( DELETE FROM measurements_staging returning * ) INSERT INTO measurements SELECT * FROM new_rows;

020

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 04/12/2024

It's @winsletts.bsky.social who is on the front of the bow isn't it

230

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 03/12/2024

"Postgres compatible" - No views/triggers/sequences - No foreign key constraints - No extensions - No NOTIFY ("ERROR: Function pg_notify not supported") - No nested transactions - No JSONB What, what IS it compatible with?

5366

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 03/12/2024

Managed to dig up a few of the pages as well

020

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 01/12/2024

Quiet house, hot coffee, good view. Time to get a little extra time in on things then continue unplugging for the weekend

090

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 29/11/2024

Don't know if I have any of the inside handy -

010

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 29/11/2024

At conferences my favorite thing we hand out is not about our products or SWAG. Yes, I love our kids activity book that has coloring pages, word search, and then activities to teach kids SQL, but it's not my favorite thing. It's a handout with a collection of Postgres tips.

1171

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 28/11/2024

Happy thanksgiving to all the US folks

1200

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 27/11/2024

Single most confusing thing about AWS ever, my AZ us-east-1d may or may not be the same as your us-east-1d

6304

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 25/11/2024

Love these small changes to the @crunchydata.com website with more and more focus on developers

020

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 20/11/2024

This seems suspicious It's like something I'd say if I were pretending to be him

000

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 19/11/2024

Every time I end up using FILTER vs. a bunch of case statements I'm reminded how great it is, and sad I only really started heavily using it about 2 years ago.

040

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 19/11/2024

CREATE TABLE taxi_trips() with (load_from = 'd37ci6vzurychx.cloudfront.net/trip-…'); SELECT count(*) FROM taxi_trips;

063

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 12/11/2024

But how does Google docs come into play? Google docs has this handy =importdata("url.csv") function that will auto-import data. So you can: * Write a query, click save * Share it, copy the url * Import into google docs * Chart/manipulate to your hearts content. All literally in under a minute.

191

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 31/10/2024

Keeping up the fun fruit thing

100

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 29/10/2024

In the database world the idea of OLTP vs. OLAP is a common one, but if you're not a database person what does that actually mean. While running the risk of oversimplifying there are two parts to this, the way data is stored and the type of queries you are running against it. More details in 🧵

1114

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 28/10/2024

If you've been working with data lakes or warehouses Iceberg files are going to be part of your future, and it's a future I welcome based on the innovation they bring. For us @crunchydata.com it's actually core to what we're building in our analytics product.

010

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 28/10/2024

In my career there are a few things that you can tell will change the landscape of things. Modern frameworks Rails/Django/Laravel were that, Git was that, the cloud was that. Iceberg is no doubt in that category.

4100

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 28/10/2024

I didn’t think this site would go downhill so fast

040

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 25/10/2024

Hacker news really gone off the deep end this time. "As the author, I can answer this: because I believe there is such a thing as "enough money.” " Sheesh who is this guy

130

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 25/10/2024

For as much as people are all about self managing. When it comes to databases even DHH admitted it's not as crazy to have someone manage your database like @crunchydata.com as is the case on the app side.

120

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 25/10/2024

Todays coffee mug works for both holidays

110

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 24/10/2024

Colleagues have started to make from of my for regularly talking about all sorts of fun and exotic fruits available in California, but really the winner may be Romanesco. In the broccoli/cauliflower family but so much better than both of them.

110

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 23/10/2024

New prized possession is getting close to being ripe

110

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 22/10/2024

People often ask my preferred editor for Postgres.That's it's it's psql. I use a CLI for most things, so why not Postgres. But for many it's a learning curve. The biggest thing to make it easier to work with... \e will open up your default $EDITOR Of course vim is the right default

181

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 21/10/2024

For years PgBouncer has always been useful when running #Postgres, but there was an argument against it because of prepared statements. But in version 1.21 prepared stmnt support was added to PgBouncer leaving you with no reason not to use it. Check your idle conn count to see if you could benefit.

0112

Craig @craigkerstiens.com · 11/05/2023

People give hacker news a hard time, but seems like pretty good comments and smart people to me.

040