conf

Last Friday was the first PGDay Denver, a regional one day Postgres conference, put on by Kevin Kempter and the folks who run the Denver Postgres User Group. We had between 50 and 75 people, which is pretty good turnout for a first time event. I gave two talks, my "Essential PostgreSQL.conf" talk (slides here) and my "Advanced WAL File Management with OmniPITR" talk (slides here). It was my first time in Denver (outside of the airport at least), and I have to say that the city is very well laid out for conference goers. The one tricky part was getting from the airport to downtown, but once you are downtown, their are plenty of good places to eat/drink, plenty of hotels, and the conference center itself is massive. After a couple nights on the town, I was honestly left surprised that I hadn't been to a conference here before (maybe OSCon should swing through some year?) and hoping I'll get the chance to go back. In any case, thanks to the PGDay Denver folks for putting together a nice event, and hopefully we'll see others follow their lead with more PGDay's in their part of the country.

I'm sitting in SFO tonight, awaiting my return trip back to Hurricane Pending Maryland. (As a former Floridian, I must of course scoff at any notions that this hurricane is significant). Walking through the airport I noticed a large billboard about "Big Data and the Cloud". This is the kind of billboard you only see in Silicon Valley; I don't see signs like that in Portland or Ottawa, and certainly not when I had to change flights in Detroit this year.

Anyway, these two buzz words aren't a local phenomenon, and are actually taking the tech world by storm. Big Data has become serious enough that there are multiple conferences now for folks interested in the topic. And cloud, well, perhaps harder to define, but more and more businesses are moving to the cloud every day. The problem here is that, most of the traditional ideas on big data run entirely counter to the ideas that work well in the cloud.

Last spring I moderated a panel PGEast in New York that focused on Postgres in the cloud. As someone who works on multi-terabyte systems, and someone who deals with cloud servers on at least a semi-regular basis, I tried to prod and poke my panelists into sharing their take on how they see Postgres's role in the cloud. Not too surprisingly, the idea behind "Big Data" on Postgres in the cloud was not a particularly popular one. The tools you need to do the job effectively with Postgres just aren't there. Not to say you can't try, but so far I haven't seen many wild successes.

Next month at Surge though, I'm going to be involved in another panel focusing on "Pushing Big Data To The Cloud". This time though I'm turning over moderating duties to long-time thought leader in the MySQL community Baron Schwartz. Joining me on the panel are several folks who all have a stake in the idea of Big Data in the cloud; John Hugg and Philip Wickline from VoltDB and Hadapt, respectivly, two new database vendors built with scale-out in mind; Bryan Cantrill, VP of Engineering at Joyant, a cloud provider with thier own strong opinions on dealing with data in the clouds, and Kate Matsudaira, someone who is currently managing those multi-TB databases, all in the cloud, over at SEOMoz. This should be a really good mix of people using different technology, with different biases against the problems involved. If you're looking to work on Big Data in The Cloud, I hope you'll join us, it should be a lot of fun.

In spite of all previous notions to the contrary, thanks to some last minute wrangling by the conference organizers, I will be making the trek out to Chicago this September for Postgres Open after all. I had been planning to sit out the event and just stay focused on Surge (which, I must say, looks even more kick ass than last year), but after looking at the schedule, and some persuading at OSCon, I'm very excited about what has been put together, and look forward to seeing many of my fellow Postgres community members once again.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I'll be reprising my talk from this years Velocity conference, "Managing Databases in a DevOps Environment". At Velocity, the talk was intended to highlight how people already familiar with DevOps should approach their databases systems. I'm not sure how well "DevOps" is understood within the Postgres community, so I think I'll try to emphasize the differences between managing databases and traditional services, to hopefully give better expectations to DBA's whose organizations might be undergoing such a change. If you're going to be at Postgres Open and are interested in the topic, I'd love to hear your feedback on what aspects of this topic you're most interested in. (PS. I'll also be heading to the Velocity Summit next week in San Francisco, for those attending, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic as well).

OK, I am just trying to set the record straight. People are still confused thinking I might be going to PGWest, but I'm not. I know where the confusion comes from; on the PG West website, there is a picture of me in the banner graphic; which makes people think I am going to PG West. This is not unreasonable, it's just untrue. For what it's worth, I did ask Joshua to remove my picture when people first started asking me if I was going, and he said he would, but that was well over a month ago. I do think he will take it down, but in the mean time, I figure I should at least put some effort into clarifying things myself. So, to be clear, I will not be going to PG West this year. Also, to be clear, it's not that I have anything against PG West per se. I've gone to multiple PG West cons in the past, and I suspect I'll probably go to more in the future. It's just that this year, I've got something better to go to. That something is Surge.

What is Surge?

Surge is the premeire conference on internet scalability. Now, I have to disclose, I am affiliated with the conference, but this conference really stands on it's own merits, no question. Now in it's second year, Surge packs an incredible lineup of people leading large scale operations on the net. Reading through the speakers list, I see companies like Yahoo, Wikia, Message Systems, Varnish, MyYearbook, Percona, Etsy. If you are trying to grow at scale, you can learn a lot from this crowd.

Yeah, but I'm a DBA

So most people going to PGWest are probably DBA's, or at least work closely with Postgres, so it makes sense for them to go to PGWest; I get that. But here is why you may not want to. The thing about Surge is that, while it isn't a database conference per se, a fair amount of the content does revolve around managing data. Let's face it, if you are running a website at scale, chances are you have to deal with large amounts of data. Whether it's massive data on disk, or dealing with massive throughput of data, or trying to figure out how to visulaize all that data, Surge has it covered. And what I find most intriguing is that because Surge is not focused on any particular technology, you get to see both problems and solutions from different angles, which I think helps to learn even more. Of course, you don't have to take my word for it; scan the speakers list, check out the talk profiles, and see if there isn't something there looks awesome.

See you in September

In any case, record set straight. You know where I'll be, I hope to see you then. Oh, and in case you need incentive, early bird pricing is still in effect until the end of July. Get on it!

I think I'm just about dug out from last weeks NYC trip for PGEast. I have to say I had a good time at the conference, although I was kept busy enough not to be able to get to see nearly as many presentations as I would have liked. One thing I did walk away with was a renewed appreciation for the projects we get to work on at OmniTI. I angled most of my talks toward PostgreSQL 9.0, going in thinking that a majority of people would have probably made the move already. Apparently that isn't the case, which in retrospect seems obvious; a majority of our customers still run some 8.x version of Postgres, as we work to vet applications and find the right windows to make their upgrades happen. Still, we are fortunate to have some clients who are very aggressive when it comes to server versioning, and we're lucky enough to get to run a healthy amount of Postgres 9, in some cases with fairly complex distributed server arrangements.

In any case, as per the title of this post, slides for my talks are now up on slide share, feel free to peruse, and if you have any questions please let me know.

On Monday I spoke at the Highload++ conference in Moscow, Russia. This is an annual conference put on by several local Russian tech folk that focuses on large scale website architectures. This conference covers the full stack, which includes database, which includes Postgres, which is where I get included in all of this. I gave a talk with a rather generic title, "Scaling with Postgres", which incorporates both some thoughts on "tech culture" within organizations trying to scale Postgres (gleaned from years of working with these types of clients at OmniTI, plus quite a bit of mind-melding and discussion a few weeks ago at Surge conference), mixed in with some hands on pointers for those trying to do it with Postgres. I've put slides up on slideshare for those that want to view it, and I believe the Highload folks will have video up at some point.

Along side my talk were talks from fellow Postgres contributors Simon Riggs and Bruce Momjian, which focused on performance, upgrading, and replication. I thought all of the talks were good, although given some overlap in Simon and Bruce's talks, I think it would have been cool to cut the talks time and maybe have a short panel for open Postgres Q&A for all three of us. (This is likely difficult from a practical perspective, given the need for translations, but it seems doable). Instead, since Simon went first, he ended up taking the brunt of people's questions; which was amusing for Bruce and me, but I think a panel would have been good. Maybe next time.

Anyway, I want to thank the folks running Highload for inviting me to speak, and working through the travel shenanigans. I found the conference very nicely run, and the growth they are getting in attendance is a good sign for the Russian tech community!


PS, someone at the conference had asked me about getting reconnoiter support; since I couldn't get a card, I'll just toss a link out here for him, or anyone else interested: http://labs.omniti.com/labs/reconnoiter/wiki/Support

Howdy folks,

slides are up for my talk, "Database Scalability Patterns", which I gave this week at OSCon 2010. You can get them from the OSCon page, from slideshare, or just watch it below