pgus

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.

Barring a repeat of last months snowmageddon / snowpocalypse, we're going to take another stab at heading down to Falls Church, Va, for the March BWPUG meeting. If you haven't felt like trucking out to Columbia, then please try to make this one. Depending on response we may be able to do this more often.

When: March 10th, 6:30PM.
Where: 3150 Fairview Park Dr, Falls Church, VA
Host: Noblis, Inc. and the
Noblis Innovation and Collaboration Center (NICC)

It's basically at 495 and 50 in Northern Virginia. We'll be discussing the upcoming PostgreSQL 9.0 release, including a preview of my upcoming talk at PG East.

If you're planning to attend, please RSVP to Stephen Frost via sfrost at noblis.org. The host/facility we'll be meeting at does require a government issued photo ID (eg: driver's license or passport).

Hope to see you there!

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.

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.

We're coming up on conference season again. While hectic, I always enjoy (or at least try to enjoy) conference season as a chance to not only share the things we've learned whilst abusing Postgres at OmniTI, but also as a chance to meet-up with fellow community members and see what new and interesting ways they are making use of Postgres in their worlds. First up this year, I'll be speaking at the PostgreSQL East Conference, taking place Aril 3rd-5th, in Philadelphia, PA. This year I'm involved in two talks:

The first session will be on Friday, and will take shape as a 3 hour wander through the upcoming PostgreSQL 8.4 release, now nearing beta. We'll discuss some of my favorite new features, discuss some other 8.4 related talks during the conference you'll want to see, and provide some hands on examples of 8.4 goodness.

On Sunday, I'll also be taking part in a round-table discussion on Postgres Performance, along side Greg Smith, Andrew Dunstan, and Joshua Drake. I speak with all three of these guys regularly, so I'm excited to be serving on a panel with them. I'm certain the audience will also have several notable Postgres experts, so it's likely to be a lively discussion.

In between all of that is a solid line-up of talks for DBA's, developers, and newbies as well, so if you're into Postgres, take this opportunity to get out, learn some new things, and meet some of your fellow Postgres Community members.

The last few months have been a busy time for everyone, but it's time to get focused again and get meeting again. To that end, for the BWPUG February meeting, we have lined up Stephen Frost to give a talk on Column Level Permissions in Postgres. Column level permissions are a new feature that Stephen authored which was recently committed into Postgres and will be available in the upcoming Postgres 8.4 release.

Stephen Frost is a Principal with Noblis, Inc., a non-profit organization working in the public interest supporting local, state, and federal Government. His work includes system architecture, system design, programming, unix administration, database administration, and management of the Noblis Innovation and Collaboration Center Computing Resources. As a PostgreSQL contributor, Stephen implemented roles support in 8.1 to replace the existing user/group system, and SQL column-level privileges in 8.4. As a PostGIS contributor and committer, Stephen updated the TIGER Geocoder for TIGER/Line and will be introducing a new version which works with the TIGER/Shapefile data at PGCon 2009.

Oh, and as a reminder, meetings are held at OmniTI world headquarters in Columbia, Maryland. We'll look to start around 6:30PM, and we'll have pizza and drinks available. We look forward to seeing everyone again.