conf

PGEast is the premiere Postgres conference held inside the U.S. each year, and this years conference, in Philadelphia, is now less than a month away. The organization and formatting have evolved a little from previous years, but one things still continues; a very strong presentation line up. We at OmniTI are very happy to be among that group of people, with four talks in this years conference lineup;

Know More Waiting, A Guide To PostgreSQL 9.0 by Robert Treat (hey, that's me), will give an overview of the upcoming PostgreSQL 9.0 release. While we're still a few months ahead of release, but we have a pretty good idea of what's coming in the next release, and this talk will help you start planning for how you will be able to take advantage of the new features coming our way.

PostgreSQL, meet AMQP, by Theo Schlossnagle, looks at pg_amqp, a "contrib" style module for Postgres that provides transaction style message queuing from inside of Postgres, using the AMQP standard.

Yet Another Replication Tool : RubyRep by Denish Patel, will delve into one of the newer Postgres replication solutions on the block. RubyRep is design for dead simple installation and setup, while still delivering advanced features like data comparing, synchronization between servers, and even master-master replication options.

Database Scalability Patterns by Robert Treat (me again), takes a look at the common patterns around scaling your database solution, and looks at some of the different options available to people scaling with Postgres.

But wait, there's more! While we at OmniTI are definitely excited to be participating in PGEast this year, there are a number of other good talks and speakers, including Magnus Hagander, Jeff Davis, Baron Schwartz, and many others. For full talk details, check out the conference talks page; I hope you'll journey out and say hi, it should be a pretty good time.

While a good portion of the Postgres community was making their way to France for PGDay Europe, fellow BWPUG member Greg Smith and I were manning the home-front in Baltimore at the 2009 Large Installation and Systems Administration (aka LISA) conference, held this year in Baltimore, MD. The two of us took to the exhibition floor to man a booth for the PostgreSQL project, a two-day stint that gave us plenty of face time with the LISA attendees. For me it had been three years since my last LISA conference (at my other local city, Washington, D.C.) so I was curious to see how things had changed since then. Some thoughts/notes I took while working the show floor:

1) There were a lot of Postgres users at the show. A lot of happy Postgres users. Compared to 3 years ago when we ran into just a few, more than half the people who stopped at the booth were already using Postgres.

2) No one asked me "so why should I use Postgres instead of MySQL". Which is not to say the topic of MySQL didn't come up, but the above question is by far the #1 question I normally hear working community booths (even got it at OSCon this summer), so to not get anyone asking was quite a surprise in retrospect. I think this is probably due to two factors; first that Postgres advocacy has been working hard to make the case for Postgres and clarify the differences between the two projects, and second that we've gotten a lot of converts over the past three years so there's much more knowledge about Postgres these days. A couple people showed there was still work to do; some glossed over differences between the projects, and one person even thought Postgres was the commercial version of MySQL; so the job of Postgres advocacy goes on.

3) So where did they come from? Many of the people who told us they were happy Postgres users also mentioned previous database systems they had worked on. These aren't formal numbers, but I'd say the breakdown was close to 55% MySQL, 35% Oracle, and 5% Sybase and 5% MSSQL. Again rough numbers, but that seems about right. As the LISA crowd is heavy on system administrators, the complaints were mostly that MySQL was a pain to keep running (regular corruption issues and similar problems), and Oracle just couldn't justify its cost.

4) One person I spoke told me about a problem they had with setting up authentication. They run a university where they initially setup authentication for students via LDAP which they thought was pretty nice. They then ran into a problem because the students had to write scripts for classes, which required them to hard-code in their ldap passwords in the scripts, which were easily read by other students. They ended up solving the problem by configuring the apache server to run files as the script owner rather than the more standard "nobody" user, which allowed them to prevent others from seeing individual scripts. This isn't the first person I've run into with this type of problem; I'd love to see more people blogging on topics like this.

5) Several people asked about the business model behind Postgres. Many people get stuck in the idea that every piece of open source project has a single corporate backer/owner. I've been a big proponent of highlighting both the strength of the Postgres community and the nature of being a true Open Source project; so for me these are great questions to get to talk about, but it's something we should make sure other folks volunteering for booth duty are prepared to answer.

Finally, I want to say a big thanks to the folks running LISA and to the crowd at large. In a conference thin on DBA's, we still managed to get a number of donations which will help with further advocacy efforts. I guess system admins are into solid database software too.

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.

I've been out at the Percona Performance Conference / MySQL Users Conference this week, and as you can imagine a lot of the talk about Oracle's purchase of Sun/MySQL. As someone who runs Oracle and MySQL, and perverbial elephant in the room Postgres, I've certainly spent time thinking about this, and have been asked a lot about various angles of this deal. Perhaps the biggest outright concern from folks seems to be the idea that Oracle is going to kill MySQL, with variations on the theme of being a quick death or a slow death. From what I have seen though it may not have to.

This week I'll be traveling to California to take part in the Percona Performance Conference, a two-day event run concurrently with the MySQL Users Conference, but centered around all aspects of internet based design, performance, and scalability. At OmniTI, we have helped many organizations scale their systems using Oracle, Postgres, and/or MySQL, both for high OLTP loads as well as large OLAP oriented systems. In my talk, "Scaling with Postgres" (Wednesday @ 11:55AM), I plan to explain the general path for scaling Postgres related systems, and compare how this lines up with other database systems.

Since I'll be in town for a few days, I've also signed up to do a Postgres BOF at theMySQL users conference (Wednesday @ 7:30PM). Currently the BOF has no topic, but there are a number of topics that I expect people might want to talk about, including ways to use Postgres and MySQL together, Porting applications and doing cross database development, and of course the straight-forward "why should I use Postgres?" If you are planning on coming to the BOF and have a specific topic or question you'd like answered, please post it in the comments, or send me an email.

Note I'll also be in town Thursday as well; I'm hoping to take in several of the talks during that time, but I've no official duties, so should be available for further questions and conversation during that time as well. Hope to see you there.

Today I gave my Intro to 8.4 talk for PostgreSQL East 2009. The slides covers a number of new features in PostgreSQL 8.4, using the Pagila sample database. The talk include quite a bit of back and forth discussion with attendees which was nice, but you should still be able to get something from the slides themselves. If you'd like to take a gander, slides are now available via Slideshare.