Category Archives: pgcon

pgcon, postgres, postgresql , , , , , 2 Comments

Looking toward Chicago: Postgres Open, local user groups, parties and on to October!

I’ve been incredibly busy this past month, and not blogging – being a free agent has possibly made me busier than I was before!

Postgres Open’s schedule is in near-final state. We’ve started adding talks to our Demo room on Thursday, and are looking forward to a keynote from Charles Fan, SVP at VMWare about recent developments in vmware’s cloud offerings for Postgres.

We’ll also be getting a more in-depth look at Heroku’s new postgres.heroku.com on-demand database service, as well as an open source tool they wrote called WAL-E.

Thanks to Heroku, we’ll be streaming much of the content from the conference live, so you’ll be able to catch the keynotes and many of the talks, even if you’re not there. And we’ll be sharing the videos after.

I believe we’re the first Postgres conference to do this! Someone correct me if I’m wrong. 🙂

While I’m in Chicago, I’m planning to drop by the Windy City Perl Mongers for a reprise of my 9.1 talk from OSCON.

We’re also planning a couple parties for Postgres Open, and hopefully inviting a few of the local user groups to join us.

After that, I’m headed in October to PostgreSQL Conference EU, and will be giving a talk about terabyte Postgres databases (and the problems you run into with them), and a database-specific “Mistakes were Made” talk, about operations and the tools we need to use to help us make fewer mistakes.

personal, pgcon, postgres, postgresql , , 3 Comments

Change in the air

On Tuesday, I’m headed off to PgCon, for three days of intense PostgreSQL conferencing. This conference is PostgreSQL’s major developer (and end user!) conference of the year, held in Ottawa. I’m looking forward to seeing old and new colleagues, spending a day in the developer’s meeting, and hopefully sharing some new projects.

I’m also leading the charge on the lightning talks! If you’d like to give one, find me at the conference, and we’ll see what we can do.

Finally, if you want up-to-date info about what’s happening at the conference, have a look at my twitter list for Postgres. (Right now, looks like we’re trying to track down Oleg and Teodor in the #ashcloud!)

Also, today is my last day at End Point. I’ve really enjoyed my time working for a fantastic PostgreSQL support company. I highly recommend their services – and two members of the team will be presenting at PgCon – Greg Sabino Mullane and Josh Tolley.

I’ll be taking a new position next month, and really looking forward to a few new challenges. I’m definitely staying in Portland, and continuing to work with Postgres.

If you’re headed to PgCon, find me in Ottawa and I’ll tell you all about it!

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:

community, conference, international, open source, pgcon, postgres, postgresql , , , , , , 1 Comment

What are you waiting for? Get your PgCon talks in now!


Yes, that’s me, with Tom Lane. You, too, might be able to get your picture with Tom!

Like Josh Berkus said yesterday:

As of today, you have 2 weeks left to submit talk proposals to PGCon.

You know you want to. PGCon is the international conference for PostgreSQL hackers, sysadmins, application developers, SQL geeks and other Smart People. Submit your talk! Be a Smart Person too!

PGCon will be happening May 21-22 in Ottawa, Canada, with tutorials on May 19 and 20. Some financial help is often available for speakers, but none is available for non-speakers. So submit, submit!

We particularly could use some talks on the new 8.4 features, really creative PostgreSQL applications, massive Postgres scaling, PostGIS, BioPostgres, and a few case studies. This means you.

I attended PgCon last year for the first time. Not only were the presentations top notch, but Dan Langille‘s hospitality set the groundwork for yet another fantastic community-building experience PostgreSQL community members experienced during the 2006 Anniversary summit in Toronto, again in 2007 at the first PgCon.

We had plenty of outstanding socializing and hacking opportunities. Last year’s conference started with a gathering of committers that was fodder for great pub and hallway track conversation all week. Great talks I saw included Andrew Sullivan’s Idle thoughts on PostgreSQL Project Management, Greg Sabino Mullane’s Bucardo talk about this multi-master replication tool, and Magnus Hagander’s walk through how search.postgresql.org was implemented.

Ottawa was beautiful last year, and I can’t wait to go back this May!