PGCon2012 - 2012.02.26

PGCon 2012
The PostgreSQL Conference

Peter Geoghegan

Peter Geoghegan is a database architect for 2ndQuadrant, based in Dublin, Ireland. He has made a number of notable contributions to core PostgreSQL.

Within the PostgreSQL community, Peter is notable for:

  • Modifying pgstatstatements, the contrib module that logs frequently executed queries, to support the normalization of non-prepared queries, so that, for example, the queries "select * from foo where bar = 5" and "select * from foo where bar = 6" are recognized as equivalent, and the most frequently executed queries can be monitored on-the-fly. Previously, the closest thing available to this capability was batch log-parsing tools like pgFouine.

  • Being an enthusiast of compiler technology, working to advance PostgreSQL's support for the Clang compiler.

  • Contributing a performance optimization to PostgreSQL 9.2, with which the sorting of scalar types like integers has been considerably sped-up. This has been observed to result in an over 30% performance improvement in execution time for some simple queries with ORDER BY clauses, an improvement that holds up well as the size of the underlying table grows.

  • Co-authoring the group commit feature, along with 2ndQuadrant CTO Simon Riggs.

  • Introducing a series of changes to PostgreSQL to improve its power consumption when idle, by eliminating the busy-waiting that previously prevented CPUs from entering idle states.

When not hacking on Postgres or consulting for 2ndQuadrant, Peter enjoys hiking, a very large cross section of music, and is a voracious follower of current affairs. His name rhymes with "Ronald Reagan".