Peter Geoghegan

Within the PostgreSQL community, Peter is notable for:

• Improving pg-stat-statements, 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 module was only usable with prepared queries, and the closest thing available to this capability was batch log-parsing tools like pgFouine. It is anticipated that this work will greatly increase the popularity of pg-stat-statements going forward.

• Co-authoring the group commit feature, along with 2ndQuadrant CTO Simon Riggs. In sympathetic benchmarks, with a workload that is maximally commit bound, this has been measured to improve performance by an entire order of magnitude with a sufficiently high client count.

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

• Contributing a performance optimization to PostgreSQL 9.2, with which the in-memory sorting of scalar types like integers has been considerably sped-up. This has been observed to result in an approximately 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.

• 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".