Entries by Robert Treat

This blog post is just a test posting for some new functionality just added to Planet PostgreSQL. Since it revolves around teams, I thought I'd do some self promotion, or rather, team building promotion. You see, we're still looking for DBA's here at OmniTI. Our database management practice continues to grow, and we need smart people to come work on some of the biggest systems and highest transaction loads you can find on Postgres. We'll also make you work with things like Oracle, MySQL, Sqlite, and who knows what else, just enough to make you question your assumptions. It's not for the faint of heart, but it's certainly interesting. Sound good? See the website for details, and who knows, maybe you'll end up on Planet Postgres as part of "Team OmniTI"!

Today I had a chance to sit through a sneak preview of Theo Schlossnagle's new talk Scalable Internet Architectures, to be delivered next week at Velocity 2009 (Dev sessions are an underrated side benefit of working at OmniTI). As always Theo packs a lot of good information into his talks; I could probably do blog entries on half a dozen ideas I jotted down; but I wanted to highlight something that he mentioned with regards to scaling websites via asynchronous services.

This month, the Baltimore/Washington PostgreSQL Users Group will be meeting on Wednesday, June 17th, at 6:30PM. We'll meet at our normal location at the OmniTI offices

Topic for the meeting will be a review of recent Postgres events, primarily focusing on PGcon, including discussion of talks and notes on videos that are available for viewing. We'll also be discussing the state of the PostgreSQL job market, at what has been happening within the community compared to the overall tech market.

As always "refreshments" will be made available. Hope to see you there!

I had to chuckle when reading the comments of Alan Snelsons blog entry talking about PostgreSQL's project stability in the face of recent MySQL unsteadiness. Of course it shouldn't be a surprise that mentioning Postgres around MySQL people you might get some type of negative reaction. And vice versa of course. And with other db communities too, not just these two. But I digress. However what I really liked about the comments was this quote:

"PostgreSQL vs. MySQL is a non-issue for most people because the decision is already made. I don’t know what’s the point in bringing that up every-time, it shines a bad light on the postgres community."

The beauty here is that I found this blog post via Planet MySQL, not Planet Postgres. Further I've never heard of Alan Snelson; the post's author; he hasn't spoken at a Postgres event, and isn't syndicated on Planet Postgres. As far as I know, he just some guy who uses MySQL a lot, and now is looking at Postgres. Apparently he likes it and wants to spread the word. And of course people who don't like hearing about Postgres use this as a mark against the Postgres community, even when the Postgres project has nothing to do with it. You know software is no good when people who use it want to tell you how awesome it is!

In truth, that's how a lot of Postgres advocacy works these days. When you see people posting on slashdot, most of the time it's not from people working directly with the project. For those of us who have been using Postgres for a long time, we've long since got the message that MySQL users don't want to hear about Postgres. When I sat in the MariaDB feature request round table at the Percona Performance conference, listening to people ask for feature after feature that Postgres already has; partial indexes, index fillfactor, online ddl, extensible data types, dtrace probes, PITR, the list goes on; I didn't wave the Postgres banner. The only time I spoke about Postgres was when Monty had questions about Postgres' implementation. Some people asked me why I wasn't more vocal, why didn't I tell everyone about all the wonderful things that Postgres can do? What can I say... it's the first rule of Postgres club.

For those looking for more information on the "Guide to Postgres 8.4" talk I have been giving recently, I thought I'd put up a few pointers to the information now available. First, there is now video available online from the presentation I gave at PGCon. It contains audio, video, and the slide stack to go with it. For some reason the audio feed doesn't work on my MacBook, though it does seem fine from my Linux box, so if you can get audio, it should be ok. I also noticed that some of the slides were cut in odd ways, so if you want the full slide stack from the talk, thats available on the PGCon website talk page. There's also a slightly longer slide stack from a 3 hour version of this talk I gave at PGEast which I made available at slideshare. There was supposed to be video of that session made available, but I haven't seen it yet, once it's up, I'll let you know. Hope this helps, and good luck with Postgres 8.4.

Well, another PGCon has come and gone. I always find it ironic how you struggle to cross the finish line, exhausted after such a long week, and yet really it goes by so quickly; one certainly doesn't have time to reflect while at the conference. Actually my Monday was a perfact foreshadow of the week to come; get to the airport early to make a conference call, only to realize I forgot my boarding pass and then scambling to make the flight. As normal I landed in Ottawa completely unprepared for actually getting from the airport to campus, but was once again bailed out, running into Stephen Frost, whose flight had gotten bumped so he ended up on my plane, and so I hitched a ride with him into the city. My Tuesday would have similar ups and downs, spending a lot of hours on work projects, catching some of the tutorials for the day, some disorganized dinner plans, and then finally breaking bread with some of the Etsy crew with whom I've been working with recently.

Passing this forward for a good cause, hopefully some of you can help out.

The African Elephant Specialist Group (with the Asian Elephant Specialist Group) is working on the redesign of the AED to become a multi-species database, the first version of which is the African and Asian Elephant Database. With funding from USFWS we are hiring a developer to undertake the project. I've put a copy of the TOR and Functional Specification on my site, but for more information, please contact:

Diane Skinner
Programme Officer
IUCN/SSC African Elephant Specialist Group

PO Box 68200 - 00200
Nairobi, Kenya
Tel: +254-20-890605 - 12
Fax: +254-20-890615

Email: Diane.Skinner@iucn.org
Website: www.african-elephant.org

Note that the deadline for applications is May 11th, 2009.