Comments on: FlightAware: FreeBSD and PostgreSQL

By: Wave2.org » Blog Archive » PostgreSQL - Rock Solid in the face of forking MySQL

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:43:29 +0000

[...] with the BSD license, another notable release last month was FreeBSD 7.2, a great platform to complement the reliability of PostgreSQL and another way to gain some performance improvements. Speaking of [...]

By: FreeBSD in der prof. Anwendung auf F!XMBR

FreeBSD in der prof. Anwendung auf F!XMBR — Sun, 20 May 2007 22:13:17 +0000

[...] es halt auf Qualität ankommt [...]

By: zillablog

zillablog — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 19:45:44 +0000

FlightAware using PostgreSQL…

We’ve recently added FlightAware to the PostgreSQL Featured Users list and added some new quotes to the quotes archive.

FlightAware provides on-line tracking of airline flights for free. The service runs on BSD and PostgreSQL and makes use of Slon…

By: Joseph Scott’s Blog » Blog Archive » Why Don’t More Developers Use FireBug?

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 18:53:09 +0000

[...] First up, I’ll pick on my own site. We’ll take my entry on FlightAware: FreeBSD and PostgreSQL as an example. You’ll see the red circle come up and indicate that there are 4 errors. If you dig into those errors you’ll find that they are from the Google AdSense ads on the site. Unfortunately the code causing the errors is inserted by the Google ads when the page is loaded, so there doesn’t seem to be much that I can do about that. I may try to chance the style of ads to see if I can make it work later on. [...]

By: nevermind

nevermind — Tue, 30 May 2006 17:28:09 +0000

RAID 1 seems surprising. I’d have thought RAID 5. I wonder what their reason behind that choice was. It’s a very impressive site though. One of the most interesting and useful open-source implementations I’ve seen.

By: Karl Lehenbauer

Karl Lehenbauer — Tue, 16 May 2006 00:33:59 +0000

The 40M inserts per day is accurate, and you are correct that at peak times it’s much greater than 460 inserts per second. This is what we use the memory resident database for — to provide a rapid way to store it and to rapidly provide query results for aircraft in-flight and generate the track logs to the map servers, etc.

Once a flight completes or certain other conditions are met, the flight track is logged to the PostgreSQL database, but as a single transaction. So for example a three hour flight might generate 200-300 position updates, but when the flight completes, those are stored in the database as a single insert, and we let PostgreSQL’s “toast” system efficiently handle the somewhat oversized record.

As to the six minute delay, five minutes of that are intentionally added upstream by the FAA. Latencies transmitting and receiving the data and then decoding, interpreting, and processing it takes a little less than a minute.