Category Archives: community

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Off to MySQL Con

I’m presenting a 25-minute talk on “Thinking about Performance” on Wednesday, around 5:25p at the Percona Performance Conference. My plan is to talk about performance testing and how to go about useful optimizations. This will be in the context of the PostgreSQL Performance Pad testing, and the performance-focused talks Mark Wong has been giving at Portland State University. Stop by if you get the chance – and you’re in San Jose! It’s free.

Robert Treat will be giving a talk on PostgreSQL at 11:15am that should be good, and we’re having a BoF during MySQL Con at 7:30pm. Quite a bit of Postgres-focused content at MySQL Con on Wednesday 🙂

I’m sad that I’ll be missing the Open Source Bridge Town Hall tomorrow night, but you should go! 🙂

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Greg’s THREE talks at PostgreSQL Conference East

Greg Sabino Mullane will be presenting three talks at PostgreSQL Conference East this weekend in Philadelphia, at Drexel University. The talks are listed on the site, and here’s what he’ll be speaking about:

Bucardo
April 5, Sunday, 10am
Bucardo is a replication system for Postgres that uses triggers to asynchronously copy data from one server to many others (master-slave) or to exchange data between two servers (master-master). We’ll look at replication in general and where Bucardo fits in among other solutions, we’ll take a look at some of its features and use-cases, and discuss where it is going next. We’ll setup a running system along the way to demonstrate how it all works.

Monitoring Postgres with check_postgres.pl
April 4, Saturday, 2:30pm
What should you monitor? And how? We’ll look at the sort of things you should care about when watching over your Postgres databases, as well as ways to graph and analyze metadata about about your database, with a focus on the check_postgres.pl script.

The Power of psql
April 4, Saturday 10:30am
All about everyone’s favorite Postgres utility, psql, the best command-line database interface, period. We’ll cover basic and advanced usage.

I’ve seen a few of Greg’s talks — The Magic of MVCC, Cloning an elephant and a few others. He’s a great speaker and cool guy. And he’s my boss. But I’m not just saying that because he’s my boss! Really!

He doesn’t like to brag about himself, so I’m gonna help him out. He maintains DBD::Pg, check_postgres.pl, Bucardo and has had MANY patches committed to PostgreSQL. He’s also a volunteer for the PostgreSQL sysadmins team, and specifically helps maintain the git repo box. He’s a contributor to the MediaWiki project. He’s on the board of the United States PostgreSQL Association. He’s basically awesome.

If you’re gonna be there, you should check out his talks. And if you can’t make it, here’s hoping Josh Drake records the talks and shares them with us all! 🙂

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Open Source Bridge hackathon on Sunday

Igal just posted to the osbridge-technology list:

Join us to work on one or more of these for Open Source Bridge this weekend:

1. Code: Add features and specs to the OpenConferenceWare conference
app. Join in if you’ve got Ruby on Rails coding experience, such as
contributing code to Calagator.

2. Text: Compose documents for outreach to user groups, educational
institutions, open source projects, and the like.

3. Outreach: Contact user group leaders, educators, open source
projects, mailing lists, etc to encourage them to spread the word about
the conference and submit proposals.

We’ll meet up at Ristretto[1] at 10am, then move on to a working lunch
nearby at the Lompoc 5th Quadrant[2]. Some members will leave as soon as
2pm, but others will stay on later. Join us for however much of this you
can.

Thanks!

-igal

[1] Ristretto Coffee: 3808 N Williams Ave, Portland, OR 97213 —
[2] Lompoc, 5th Quadrant: 3901 N Williams Ave, Portland, OR

Join us! First three people to make it to Ristretto in the morning get one of these open source nerd merit badges.

community, pdxpug, pgcon, portland, postgres, postgresql, user groups , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Twitter and PostgreSQL!

Twitter: What are you doing?
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

On pgsql-general, Doug Hunley mentioned he’d created a twitter account for pgsql-announce! Way cool.

I’d written during last PgCon about Postgres and Twitter, and I figured it was time for a new list of Postgres-related people who I follow! Especially since a few people commented that Twitter was a waste of time last year 😉

If you’re on twitter (or identi.ca), and I missed you — please comment below!

Here we go (in no particular order):

  • Selena Deckelmann (me!)
  • Gabrielle Roth, member of PDXPUG, main force behind Code-N-Splode
  • Mark Wong, performance expert, leading the Portland PostgreSQL Performance Pad and associated projects to bring regular performance testing back to PostgreSQL
  • Francisco Figueiredo Jr., developer maintainer of Npgsql, speaker, member of PostgreSQL.Br
  • Magnus Hagander President of Pg.EU – the European Union non-profit organization dedicated to PostgreSQL and supporting user groups in the region
  • Josh Berkus, pgsql-advocacy leader, Member of the PostgreSQL core team
  • Jean-Paul Argudo, leader/member of PostgreSQL.Fr and Treasurer of Pg.EU
  • Hubert Lubaczewski , author of a great technical blog about PostgreSQL http://www.depesz.com/
  • Nikolay Samokhvalov, leader of the Moscow PostgreSQL Users Group, and consultant in Russia
  • Kristin Tufte, Postgres user, member of PDXPUG and assistant professor at Portland State University
  • Satoshi Nagayasu, member of the Japanese PostgreSQL Users Group, and spearheading meetups in Tokoyo
  • Brenda Wallace, moble gadget fetishist, Drupalista and Wellington, NZ PostgreSQL User Group wrangler
  • Isis Borges, Postgres enthusiast, works in the fashion industry in Puerto Alegre, Brazil
  • Dan Langille, DBA and organizer behind PgCon
  • Michael Brewer, DBA and board member of the United States PostgreSQL Association
  • Joshua Drake, business owner, board member of the United States PostgreSQL Association
  • Fábio Telles Rodriguez, active member of the PostgreSQL.Br (Brazil) and PgDay Brazil organizer. If you speak Portuguese, you can check out Planet Postgres Br here – http://planeta.postgresql.org.br/
  • Fernando Ike, member of PostgreSQL.Br
  • Ed Borasky, PhD, analytics nerd, PDXPUG member
  • Robert Treat, author of PHP and PostgreSQL book, speaker, on the board of the United States PostgreSQL Association
  • David Wheeler, contributed citext most recently to PostgreSQL, consultant, maintainer of Bricolage, formerly of I Want Sandy
  • Greg Sabino Mullane, author of Bucardo and check_postgres.pl, maintainer of DBD::Pg, recently contributed patches to psql, on the board of the United States PostgreSQL Association, my boss 🙂
  • Christophe, volunteer at OSCON for PostgreSQL booth, DBA
  • Aaron Thul, DBA, developer, speaker on PostgreSQL on Drugs 🙂
  • David Fetter, DBA, maintainer of the PostgreSQL Weekly News
  • Elein Mustain, DBA, speaker, maintainer of http://varlena.com
  • Chris May, DBA, member of PDXPUG
  • Jason Kirtland, developer, maintainer of SQLAlchemy, Pythonista
  • Josh Tolley, developer, DBA, statistics nerd, author of PL/LOLCODE and pgsnmpd
  • Erik Jones, Portland resident, Pythonista, made a cool python-based partitioning tool (pgpartitioner)
  • Nicholas Kreidberg, Nevada resident, PostgreSQL user
  • Gavin Roy, DBA, Business dude, Myyearbook.com, speaker, on the board of of United States PostgreSQL Association
  • Chris Browne, Slony maintainer
  • Douglas Hunley, creator of pgsql_announce on twitter 🙂
  • Larry Rosenman, PostgreSQL supporter, help with DNS for PostgreSQL.org, contributor (some of the syslog* stuff in version 7.0)

Organizations:

conference, postgres, postgresql, scale , , , , 4 Comments

Report from SCaLE 7x

DSC_0079
Awesome booth volunteers Noel and Erez!

In the elevator this morning, a person asked me if I was with the SCaLE conference. He started by saying that he was really happy that we (the people attending the conference) were there, and that he hoped for Linux to be successful. And then he said, “I’m a linux supporter, but I’m a windows captive.”

Because I work every day with free software, I lose touch with people who feel trapped by their operating system. That moment in the elevator reminded me that not everyone is as lucky as I am!

This is my second year attending SCaLE. I’m just as excited as I was last year about the number of end users, systems administrators, and enthusiastic supporters of free and open source software. During Joe Brockmeier’s keynote, he asked the crowd to raise their hands if they were already contributing to an open source project, and less than 1/3 of the crowd raised their hands. Other conferences I attend seem to attract mostly people who are already contributors. I’m very happy to see SCaLE having a wider reach.

My favorite event was definitely the PostgreSQL LAPUG birds of a feather session on Saturday evening. We filled the room and had to fetch chairs from outside! Josh Berkus and Magnus Hagander provided some great slides that I used for a quick tour through new SQL programming, administrative and security features in the upcoming release of 8.4. This presentation was basically a tag team effort between myself and Josh.

More than 3/4 of the people had never attended a PostgreSQL user group meeting before, and I hope to hear that they all subscribe to the mailing list and attend some meetings!

We had great traffic at the Postgres booth. There were a surprising number of people who asked about migrating from MSSQL to Postgres. Fortunately, we had at least one person with a fair amount of Windows experience at the booth (Thanks, John!). I also was grateful that many people stopped by with follow up questions about the filesystems I/O talk I gave. I really felt like it was well received, and I hope that we end up with a few new recruits to our testing.

Great show! And now I’m off to relax downstairs before I work a downtime this evening 🙂

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How to kill 4 chickens in 3 years

I had a great time at Ignite Portland 5 last night. There were seventeen other fantastic presenters, amazing volunteers and the always great Legion of Tech crew there to cheer us all on. Oh, and like 700 people in the crowd!

Thanks to everyone who helped me out on this presentation. Especially my husband, Scott, who really did volunteer for that slide.

Enjoy the slidecast below, with some audio commentary I recorded this morning (drop.io FTW!) below. @linuxaid‘s video should be up soon!

How to kill 4 chickens in 3 years

And here’s @linuxaid’s video:

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Gratitude, freedom and open source

Audrey just wrote a fantastic blog entry about Open Source Bridge, her thoughts about citizenship, and what it means to be a responsible open source citizen.

Yesterday, Forbes published a piece talking about the “open source collaboration gap” and waxed poetic about why it is that corporate IT doesn’t contribute back to open source projects the way that individuals do.

One possible explanation from the article is that there is really a gratitude gap – institutions just can’t feel gratitude or express gratitude the way that individuals can. I kinda like that idea. But paradoxically, Dan Woods then suggests that if we were to just measure the tangible benefits of open source, we’d have our argument for IT contributing back. Well, if the problem is gratitude.. I can’t say that I agree that more metrics are going to fix the collaboration gap.

So, I would try to solve this problem differently. I think that changing collaboration patterns happens one person at a time – with individuals deciding to pursue hobbies and work that interest them, hopefully doing work that matters. To make institutions better open source citizens, they have to change their policies and behaviors so that they encourage, rather than discourage individual contributions.

Encourage individuals to contribute to open source projects from inside large companies, and let individual interest and creativity guide those contributions. The Free Software Foundation was created by a guy who just wanted to solve a problem with a printer. If you run a company, let your employees solve their problems!

That freedom to think, be creative and do something that matters are the parts of my community and my work I most value.

So, if there’s something about free and open source software, your development community, your personal project that inspires you, please submit a proposal to our conference. We want to hear from you!

Photo courtesy of flickr user kalandrakas, under a Creative Commons license.

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Waffle-induced development


My waffles will probably not look as good as this.

People often ask me for advice on how to motivate and get people excited about coming to meetings, participating in user groups and contributing to projects. I’m going to try to blog more about the things I do that work.

Friends in Portland know that I often use food (and sometimes alcohol) bribes to get them to come over to my house to hang out, and then do work that is best done with a group (recall a major weeding project in my front yard).

We needed a few good folks to help out with the next phase of our Open Conference Ware application, and so I decided to reuse this “get house chores done” trick to hopefully motivate a few hungry developers to work with us on the next phase of the project.

When I sent out the message, I got both an enthusiastic “Hell yes, I’ll come for waffles”, and an “Oh man, I already had plans — which, if they fall through, I will totally be there for the waffles.”

I’m sure that the good people who stepped up to help us would have done so anyway. But, if I can provide a warm breakfast while we hack away on wireframes, why not? And, after I tweeted what we were up to, I got another volunteer!

Image courtesy of rizkapb, Creative Commons 2.0 generic license.

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FSM, visibility map and new VACUUM awesomeness


Heikki Linnakangas, listening as Simon Riggs sketches on the chalkboard.

Update: Heikki’s slides are here!

Heikki Linnakangas gave a presentation this past Sunday at FOSDEM about the improved free space map (FSM), which tracks unused space inside the database, and new visibility map, a bitmap which will indicate which data pages can be skipped during a partial VACUUM. This performance enhancement will affect all users of the upcoming 8.4 software release. You can see what the new FSM implementation looked like back in October from depesz’s blog.

Despite Heikki’s modest claim during the talk that the performance tests were inconclusive, the consensus among Postgres contributors is that this feature will result a substantial improvement in the performance of VACUUM for tables that are large, but have few UPDATEs.

The new free space map and Visibility map (in 8.4) and autovacuum (enabled by default starting in version 8.2) are huge administrative usability improvements to version 8 of Postgres. Prior to version 8.1, VACUUM had to be scheduled outside of database system. Autovacuum has been part of the core Postgres distribution for over two years, and is tunable via several global configuration parameters.

The visibility map enables partial VACUUMs — meaning that VACUUM no longer has to examine every tuple to update the FSM. The new FSM implementation eliminates two configuration parameters, effectively automating a formerly manual configuration process.

The new FSM is stored on disk in seperate files inside of $PGDATA/base/, and is cached in shared_buffers. The result is that the max_fsm_* configuration parameters are no longer in 8.4 — Postgres is able to track and adjust this data structure without user intervention.

A few critical features of the new FSM are:

* Now a binary tree structure
* Constructed using 1 byte per heap page
* The top level shows the maximum amount of contiguous space available
* The data structure is auto-repairing and can be reconstructed from the bottom

Previously, every time that VACUUM was run, the free space map had to be reconstructed from scratch. Now, individual nodes in the map may be updated (aka “retail” updates).

Visibility map is a bitmap of heap pages which tracks which tuples on pages are visible to transactions, and therefore not available for VACUUMing.

Previously, when VACUUM ran, it *had* to look at every tuple in a table, because there was no information about which pages may not have been updated since the last VACUUM. With the visibility map, VACUUM will now be able to perform partial scans of table data, skipping pages which are marked as fully visible. Partial scans means fewer I/O operations for VACUUM, and happier database administrators.