Databases, Open Data, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 18, 2025

• Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ pgSCV 0.15.0 released!

    pgSCV is a Prometheus-compatible monitoring agent and metrics exporter for PostgreSQL environment. The goal of the project is to provide a single tool (exporter) for collecting metrics from PostgreSQL and related services.

    Since the last post between the pgSCV v0.14.0 and v0.15.0 releases, a lot of new functionality has been implemented and many issues have been fixed, here is a short list of the main new features: [...]

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Phoenician colonization

      I was reading Phoenician colonization from its origin to the 7th century BC (Manzano-Agugliaro et al. 2025) and thought it was an interesting dataset, but alas: it is split in four tables, behind a javascript redirect (wtf Taylor & Francis?) and with DMS coordinates (including typos and special characters)… So not easily reusable.

      Let’s go build an accessible dataset.

• Standards/Consortia

  • uni Cambridge ☛ UTF-8 history

    That's not true. UTF-8 was designed, in front of my eyes, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992.

    What happened was this. [...]