twittering on 2011-02-17

  • The Open-By-Rule Benchmark http://t.co/hV3VkLK via @maslett #
  • Put a Conference On It is the new Put a Bird on It. 20 conferences so far in PDX in 2011 http://bit.ly/fXyFHi (phrase ht @thesethings) #
  • In case you're wondering, pricing posted & March 7 is the target start date for Intro to PostgreSQL http://bit.ly/hALpdr #codelesson #
  • Listening to lightning talks w @mrthackston at AgilePDX #
  • OH: profitable, sustainable and joyful. (World class software development in portland) #fuckyeah #
  • I am in love with AgilePDX's mission and visioning process. The work agreement is art. #

twittering on 2011-02-16

This year is so nuts for having conferences in Portland, OR

UPDATED! Just added Open Gov West! Rearranged, and just listing these all in order now. And added #140Conf in Vancouver, WA. It’s close enough. đŸ™‚ And just added Digital Journalism Portland.

For real.

This summer belongs to the nerds, geeks and hackers. I can’t believe that Portland’s tech scene got no love from Portlandia this year. Thank heavens they got a second season!

I did some research, and found TWENTY distinct conferences happening from now through November in the Portland area.

Anyway, there’s a sweet new service that you might not have heard of called Lanyrd, and a quick search over there revealed 20 conferences.

And over the next few days, several people suggested a few more:

  1. Agile Open Northwest 2011, 8-9 February 2011
  2. SearchFest 2011, 23rd February 2011
  3. Python Software Foundation Sprint, Feb 26th
  4. PDX11 Civic Hacking Unconference, April 1-2, 2011 (Plans are coming together now.. so pencil it in!)
  5. Innotech, April 21, 2011
  6. TEDxPortland, April 30, 2011
  7. JSConf US 2011, 2nd–3rd May 2011 (Rumors of crazy fun abound for this, also a party open to the public. Epic!)
  8. NodeConf 2011, 5th May 2011
  9. Open Gov West, 13-14 May 2011
  10. Digital Journalism Portland, 14th May 2011
  11. #140Conf Northwest, 19th May 2011
  12. WebVisions 2011, 25th–27th May 2011
  13. World Domination Summit, 4th–5th June 2011
  14. HotStorage ’11, 14th June 2011 (Third workshop on hot topics in storage!)
  15. USENIX ATC ’11, 15th–17th June 2011 (USENIX’s annual technical conference)
  16. WebApps ’11, 15th–16th June 2011 (Second annual conference from USENIX on webapps!)
  17. Open Source Bridge 2011, 21st–24th June 2011 (Third year! CFP still open!)
  18. IndieWebCamp, 25th–26th June 2011
  19. OSCON 2011, 25th–29th July 2011 (Back in Portland, Again! And @gorthx is on the committee!)
  20. Community Leadership Summit 2011, 23rd–24th July 2011
  21. Vida Vegan Blog Conference, 26th–28th August 2011 (Blogger conference for vegans! Crazy!)
  22. DjangoCon US 2011, 6th–8th September 2011 (Organizer recently relocated to Portland!)
  23. Pacific NW Drupal Summit, October 14-16, 2011
  24. SPLASH 2011, 22nd–27th October 2011
  25. Onward! 2011, 22nd–27th October 2011 (@al3x is on the committee for this!)
  26. Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2011, 9th–12th November 2011

Sources: Lanyrd, Plancast, Calagator and the comments.

What other geekery did I miss? Let me know in the comments.

UPDATE:

Here are the conferences without dates:

PostgreSQL at MySQL Users Conference: the sessions!

You’ve probably seen a few posts about this – from the CFP, to Baron’s recent pointer to the release of the schedule. And now Josh Berkus just posted a Meetup for the event, so that spurred me on for this post…

So, just to make things even easier for you, I thought I’d summarize the awesome talks we’re having at the O’Reilly MySQL Users Conference this year related to PostgreSQL.

We’re also having a Birds of a Feather session, and staffing a booth on the exhibit floor!

If you’re planning to attend, you can use my code & save 25% in addition to early registration savings: mys11fsd: http://oreil.ly/goaqst

Hope to see you there!

Weekly tweet digest for 2011-02-13

Hot Standby features for 9.1, just committed: Pause and Resume

On February 8th, Simon Riggs committed a couple new functions that will allow Hot Standby to be paused and resumed. You can already *read* from the Hot Standby without pausing, but you could never pause the application of changes in the past. You might want to do this if you have a very high-write-volume server, and some very expensive queries that you want to run on a slave.

Basic Recovery Control functions for use in Hot Standby. Pause, Resume,
Status check functions only. Also, new recovery.conf parameter to
pause_at_recovery_target, default on.

The basic idea is that if you have a read-only standby system, you can give it the command: pg_xlog_replay_pause() and the standby will stop applying changes. Then you can use the database in read-only mode without new changes being applied. When you’re done you can issue the command: pg_xlog_replay_resume() and proceed with applying logs.

There are some related features that I can’t wait to test out around named restore points for replay. But the ability to pause replay and run queries is just awesome.

This is a feature that Simon talked about back in 2009 at FOSDEM, and I am very excited to see it implemented.

Offering an Intro to PostgreSQL class

UPDATE: See below for pricing.

I’m working with Code Lesson to offer an Introduction to PostgreSQL class.

Code Lesson is pretty cool – it’s an online course system, and the idea is you get a couple assignments and lessons taught by me each week, and there’s a midterm and final evaluation. I love conferences, but the nice thing about an online course is you don’t have to spend an entire workday taking a tutorial at a conference, or travelling to a particular location, and you can finish assignments when it’s convenient for you.

My current working outline is:

Intro to Postgres

Hello, world!
* History of PostgreSQL project
* Features
* Basic SQL

Usage
* psql
* Drivers: Perl and Python examples
* GUIs
* Documentation

Survey of features
* Full text search
* Built-in functions
* Datatypes
* Indexes
* Transactional DDL

Community
* Mailing lists & IRC
* Asking questions
* Modules, add-ons, tools

Operations
* System and hardware
* Installation and configuration
* Maintenance and operation
* Replication

Our plan is to provide students with login access to a shared database. During the course, I’ll be available to answer questions and I’m considering making short videos to go along with the course material.

We haven’t set the price for it just yet, but should be figuring that out in the next week or so.

Anyway, if you’re interested, sign up and you’ll get an email when we set the price. I’m happy to answer any questions you have about content.

Another thing that was requested in the Hacker News thread was more advanced material. I think the advanced material falls into two categories – PostgreSQL core functionality, and administration/tuning.

Update! Pricing is set at $325/student, with a 10% discount if you register 2 or more students at the same time.