Andrew Dunstan

Biography

Andrew Dunstan works for a small consulting and software company in the Triangle area of North Carolina, and contributes to PostgreSQL as an enthusiastic hobbyist as well as a sometime professional user. In addition to creating the PostgreSQL Buildfarm, he has contributed to PostgreSQL in these areas, among others:

Ability to use CIDR netmasks in the pg_hba.conf configuration file
Complete rewrite of initdb, pg_config, and pg_ctl programs in C; previously these were long shell scripts (change required for Windows port)
Vastly improved PL/Perl server-side programming language
Regression test fixes to support Windows port
New SQL quoting mechanism ("dollar quoting")
Ability to log disconnections
Ability to tag each log line with useful, configurable information
Ability to read and write Comma Separated Variable files
Revised and improved TCP/IP and Virtual Hosting configuration
Improvements in related PostgreSQL Autodoc utility
Code to assist Bugzilla project to support PostgreSQL
Establishing and administering pgFoundry site for related community projects

Articles

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The Future of Perl in PostgreSQL
Publish Date: May. 25, 2006If your PostgreSQL database doesn't do exactly what you want, you can write server-side extensions--in Perl. Andrew Dunstan discusses some of the enhancements to PL/Perl in PostgreSQL 8.0 and 8.1, as well as some of the features he and the rest of the team plan to add. Using More Perl in PostgreSQL
Publish Date: Jan. 19, 2006Perl's DBI module makes it easy to use a database. That's not the only way to interact with a database, though. If your PostgreSQL database doesn't do exactly what you want, you can write server-side extensions--in Perl. Andrew Dunstan shows how to enable PL/Perl and how to store and retrieve database data with it. Enumerated Fields in PostgreSQL
Publish Date: Jan. 6, 2006Many programming languages and some databases support enumerated types. They can make domain constraints much more robust and simple. PostgreSQL doesn't currently support them in the core, but they're reasonably easy to add. Andrew Dunstan shows how to use them. Using Perl in PostgreSQL
Publish Date: Nov. 10, 2005Perl's DBI module makes it easy to use a database. That's not the only way to interact with a database, though. If your PostgreSQL database doesn't do exactly what you want, you can write server-side extensions--in Perl. Andrew Dunstan shows how to enable PL/Perl and how to write triggers with it. Building the PostgreSQL BuildFarm
Publish Date: Feb. 24, 2005Managing a cross-platform open source project is difficult; how do you test on all the platforms you support? Leverage the time and resources of your users! Andrew Dunstan took a tip from the Samba team and recently set up a build farm for the PostgreSQL project to report build successes and failures from interested users. Here's how he did it.