I have a moderately sized 2TB production database I have enjoyed using pgBackRest on, and was—this week—going to set it up on another 8TB database we have.
What's the next-closest thing? wal-g? barman? databasus? I only get to cosplay as a DBA.
We recently moved from Barman to pgBackrest. Our main complaints with barman were that incremental backups utilized hardlinks. Which was great, we could have our 7TB database backed up, and the next day, only 20GB in changes. But, when replicating that data to cloud storage, there is no concept of hardlinks, so now we had to push 14TB to cloud storage. Also, at least last time we looked a while back, file compression was only the WAL files, unless you used the newer barman-cloud-backup tool, which we did not.
Also, pgBackrest lets you do the majority of the backup from a physical standby, which is VERY nice for removing the load off production.
None of these seemed like issues, until we looked at pgBarman, and suddenly realized how nice that would be.
We just piped the backups through pigz for compression; rapidgzip also exists for parallelized decompression (or any other compression algorithm you’d like to use, of course).
I can beat you on the timing - I'd never used pgBackRest before, but started setting it up on a project about 2 hours ago, by the time I'd finished the README had been updated.
Not for PostgreSQL, but for MariaDB we run replicas in FreeBSD jails on a server with lots of ZFS space. The jailed Maria instances just stop every hour (so the DB flushes everything to disk), the host snapshots all of their data volumes, and then starts the jails back up. Within a minute or so they're fully caught up to the primaries again. Gives us months and months of recovery checkpoints.
It's great because it's a completely clean save from a shutdown state, so when we need a scratch copy of a database it only takes as long as cloning whatever snapshot we want (depending on how far back we need to to), then starting a scratch jail that runs from those clone filesystems. When finished, just shutdown scratch and delete the clones, it's like it never happened.
A previous company I was at did this on the primary. It always seemed to work, but no one was really comfortable with it, largely because there wasn't too much ZFS experience at the time and also because the process did not coalesce the database before doing it. I think it's still a valid strategy, but not one I have had time to verify thoroughly.
**Backup types**
- **Logical** — Native dump of the database in its engine-specific binary format. Compressed and streamed directly to storage with no intermediate files
- **Physical** — File-level copy of the entire database cluster. Faster backup and restore for large datasets compared to logical dumps
- **Incremental** — Physical base backup combined with continuous WAL segment archiving. **Enables Point-in-time recovery (PITR)** — restore to any second between backups. Designed for disaster recovery and near-zero data loss requirements
EDIT: It seem PITR has been added this March (for PostgreSQL)
I ran a sports streaming service ("pirated sports streaming service" ?). The US Government said I was making $250k MRR as a solo indie dev (I wasn't, but that's great validation). I'm pretty qualified to talk about this.
The shitty part about what Spain is doing is that it punishes its own residents who have nothing to do with piracy.
Sports piracy is fundamentally different than music or movie piracy. The Spotify analogy that gets tossed around is wrong. Steam is less wrong but still wrong. Music piracy got "solved" because the labels decided that some revenue was better than no revenue, and the math works when you have a bunch of product in your back pocket that cost you nothing to distribute; gaben made piracy slightly less convenient to those in developed countries.
Sports rights are valuable because they're exclusive and because they're live. In the US, there are blackouts around sports: if you're physically located in New York (at least, according to whatever IP address data vendor a platform is using), you're unable to watch the New York Knicks using league-sanctioned products. That's the US version of this—restricting access to the content itself to protect the rights holder's revenue. It's internal logic and fundamentally sound (though infuriating) if you're one of them.
This is without a doubt categorically worse. A blackout says "you can't watch this game" and Spain is saying "you can't access the internet while this game is on, whether you're interested in the game or not." It's as if the NBA convinced the DOJ to shut down half the internet every time a game was on, just in case.
Before it was DMCA notices (useless) -> lawsuits (whack-a-mole, check TorrentFreak) -> ??? -> infrastructure-level blocking. (I'm an outlier for many reasons but we won't go into those.) Each step is more destructive and less effective than the one preceding it. Spain has reached the end of the playbook, thanks to political interests: ban the internet!
Fans are the product. La Liga's real customer is Movistar, who pays roughly a billion euros a year for exclusivity so they can bundle it into packages nobody would pay for otherwise. The IP blocking isn't an anti-piracy measure—I'd argue there is no such thing as anti-piracy but that's a different thread. The IP blocking is a signal to the next bidder: the government will protect your exclusivity at any cost, even if that cost is the country's internet.
I’m not sure, but they do sell some pre-hydrated gums and usually call them “perfected”. They are largely buying in commercial quantities and re-packaging for restaurant-scale use with their gums because a lot of the bigger ingredient companies that make the best products won’t sell in smaller than 50 lb (or sometimes even much larger) increments.
Pre-hydrated gums are usually just hydrated and then spray dried ones.
I've used their "perfected" xanthan gum which is a separate SKU from their regular xanthan gum. At least for gum arabic they seem to only offer one SKU, so I'm guessing it's not prehydrated.
I was in federal prison with Sebastien Raoult, one of the ShinyHunters guys. We were in the same unit and talked regularly.
I was about mid-way through my bid when another inmate told me "new guy in B3 is a another hacker." I got really excited—I'd have someone to talk shop with, at the very least.
My takeaway from him was that they're a bunch of contemporary "script kiddies" with a lot of time on their hands.
My dad spun up my Pentium Deschutes (400MHz!) machine the other day. Same hard drive from when I was 10 years old. “clouds.psd” was on the desktop.
I still remember retiring that computer. The first thing I did when I got my Pentium IV chip a year later was download Macromedia Dreamweaver. Did me well.
Claims Dang is using AI, and that other people are using AI even though most of the flagged post predate popular AI products. Really destroys the whole EM-Dash === AI thing.
which never should have been a thing,
because it was obviously wrong
yes AIs is more likely to use em-dash,
but that is just one, by itself very insufficient, indicator.
it's like hip size. In average over the populations
they are wider for woman. But the effect is too small
to classify the gender of a hip bone by it's size.
(Like for a specific age range and ethnicity, the difference
in median is like 1" or so, while there is a >10" difference
between 5%-percentile and 95%-percentile. Varying by gender
in difference and exact distribution.) Well I guess em-dash
are more an indication for AI then hip size for gender... lol
So if EM-Dash is good proof of AI usage, and people who we can see didn't use AI / or predate AI being popular, are flagged, then that undercuts it by a lot.
I tend to mostly use dedicated servers from Hetzner for my own projects and for my client's projects. Whenever they explicitly want US servers, I tend to go with Vultr's dedicated servers which been serving us well for many years.
I've read several reports from customers saying that their customer service is really bad. Difficult to know with online reviews of course. Does anyone have positive stories to share? I am looking at Australian hosts specifically and Hetzner doesn't have any data centers here.
We use them heavily for test boxes and running experiments. Standard off-the-shelf machines are provisioned almost instantly, and never had any problems.
More custom stuff (eg 100Gb/s NICs) takes a bit longer, but they've always been super responsive and quick to sort out any issues!
The price / performance you get from something like their AX162 is just crazy, although unfortunately with the whole RAM / NVMe shortage the setup fee has gone up quite a lot.
Using them for production for years, never dissapointed.
What you should be aware of is their new exploration of s3 storage. I mean, the s3 works and everything but it's still too eaely - the servers are kind of slow and sometimes fail to upload/download. They are still tuning out the storage architecture. The api key management is kind of too primitive (although much more headache free than configuring aws), and the online file browser is lacking
But for vps servers - they are battletested veterans
> I keep reading folks saying OpenClaw has completely changed their life while posting a picture of 58 mac minis on their desk.
I was having a conversation with someone about OpenClaw, and they proposed this idea of OpenClaw being used for inventory tracking at the retail-level. I let them continue. They said it'd be the best option for tracking when purchases are made and what SKUs are sold at what time of day. They weren't talking about prompting, they were talking about it as a data store.
I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved.
> I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved.
The ironic thing here is that the person could go to ChatGPT (or whatever), describe the problem they're looking to solve, and ask it to find them the various ways it has been solved reliably (with links to the sources to confirm the information). And even provide some details on when each solution works best and why.
They could do that, but then they'd have to then do the actual legwork after, whether that means finding the proposed solution or whatever (after maybe glancing at a few of those pesky links), installing and configuring it. What OpenClaw represents is the ability to, in natural language, state what you want and then take off with the assurance your will will be done. Just as you'd expect when tasking a human assistant.
I've long thought it would be funny to do a startup where we would make accounting software that was solely a chat interface, with the only data store being a GL account list stored in context. There is probably a VC firm dumb enough to fund it.
What's the next-closest thing? wal-g? barman? databasus? I only get to cosplay as a DBA.