postgres

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

A reminder note from Stephan Frost:

Hey all!

This month BWPUG returns to DC/Falls Church!

When: July 14th, 6:30PM (this Wednesday!)
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 work and progress made so far on the PostgreSQL Performance Farm
scripts done by Scott (an intern working for Noblis over the summer
from Virginia Tech).

If you're planning to attend, please RSVP to sfrost@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!

Thanks,

Stephen

They've actually been up for a few days now, but since I haven't mentioned it, I guess no one noticed

This includes slides for both the "Know More Waiting / Postgres 9" talk, and my "Check Please! / Postgres Monitoring". I've uploaded the slides to the conference webstie for download, but I think it needs to get a site cache rebuild or something, in the mean time you can view the slides on my slideshare page.

As always if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

After a brief hiatus, BWPUG is back with an all new meeting for June!

This months speaker will be Greg Smith, who reprises his talk from BSDCan, presenting on "PostgreSQL on FreeBSD". The talk discusses some of the technical and business hurdles in deploying database on the FreeBSD architecture, and touches on topics like what former users of OpenSolaris might be looking for in a new OS.

When: June 9th, 6:30PM.
Where: 7070 Samuel Morse Dr, Columbia, MD, 21046.
Host: OmniTI

As always we'll have time for networking and likely hit one of the local restaurants after meeting, hope to see you there.

phpPgAdmin 4.2.3 Released
-----------------------
4-13/2010

The phpPgAdmin Team is happy to announce a new bugfix release for phpPgAdmin. Version 4.2.3 fixes several long standing bugs and fixes some PHP 5 compatability issues in the 4.2.x branch. All users of phpPgAdmin are encouraged to upgrade to this new version.


Download
--------
To download right now, visit:
http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net/?page=download
(RPMs available soon)


Demo
----
To give the fully-functional demo a try, visit:
http://phppgadmin.kattare.com/phppgadmin4/


Deprecation Warning
-------------------
Note, this may likely be the last version of phpPgAdmin released on the 4.2.x branch. We are currently planning to release phpPgAdmin 5.0 this summer, which will support PHP 5+ only, and Postgres 7.3+. Legacy users should continue to use 4.2.3.


Regards,
The phpPgAdmin Team

One of the things I preach about a lot is good monitoring of your database servers; having tools in place to tell you both what good looks like and when things go bad is critical for large scale success. But sometimes you just need to monitor a momentary process, where setting up a check in your normal monitoring software is overkill. In these cases one tool that can help out is the watch command.

Case in point, the other day I needed to back up a fairly large partitioned table (about 1.3TB on disk). The plan? A quick little script to pg_dump each of the partitions (about 325). Feed the script through xargs -P so I don't swamp the box, but I get some concurrency out of things. And of course, I planned to run the whole thing in screen session. But dumping this much data will take some time, so how to check on the progress?

When working on databases, one of the most natural things to me is to whip up some SQL to see what going on inside my database. Then you pipe that through watch, and you have some quick and simple monitoring. This example happens to be on postgres, but you could do it with any database's command line program.

I'm very happy to announce that the Postgres project has been selected to participate in this years Google Summer of Code program. Over the next couple weeks we'll be looking to solidify our mentor base; if you work on Postgres and would be willing to mentor a student, please send me a note so we can get you signed up. If you are a student and you're interested in working on Postgres, now is the time to get your proposal together. Student applications will open up on March 29th, so we'd like to have our mentors in place for review, and hopefully had students discussing with the Postgres devs their proposals as much as needed. If anyone has any questions, feel free to email me, or track me down on irc.

Handy links for Postgres GSoC:

• Our ideas page for GSoC


• Our loose attempt at organization


• Our Postgres page on the GSoC site


• Users Guide to GSoC

Thanks everyone, I'm looking forward to another interesting year with GSoC, and hoping you'll join in.