My name is Joel Jacobson. I’ve been using PostgreSQL almost every day since 2002. Recently, I started getting involved in the community around this fantastic RDBMS.
I’m the backend architect and DBA at Trustly Group AB, a company processing millions of physical bank transactions.

This blog is about my experiences with postgres, stored procedures in PL/pgSQL, PL/perl and SQL in general.

I’m using postgres as the core component of mission-critical database-centric systems dealing with monetary transactions.

I’m a strong believer of the exclusive use of stored procedures and putting all business logic inside the database, where the public top-level stored procedures becomes your application’s API.

Since every financial transaction generates bookkeeping entries, I also believe it is the responsibility of the database to handle the bookkeeping of a transaction intensive system. By letting the business logic do the bookkeeping directly in the database, the bookkeeping will always be 100% in-sync and updated in real-time.

I’m very interested in bookkeeping, accounting and financial reporting, which I’ve learned is not that common among other geeks.

“Companies tended to recognize two cultures-that of the technologist and that of the bean counter” (Financial Times)

My dream is to exterminate all old-fashioned bean counters, by replacing them and their Excel-sheets with fully automated processed, where there is no need to manually push in numbers from one system to another or produce stupid Excel-reports. It should all be automated, implemented once and then all time can be spent on monitoring a computer system instead of operating a human system.