Category Archives: postgres

conference, pdxpug, pgconference, portland, postgres, postgresql

winter break is over!

Sadly, my winter vacation is over. I needed a couple weeks to recharge after a crazy year of wrapping up old stuff (finally done with the ERP project) and starting lots new things (Legion of Tech, PostgreSQL Conferences, my first cyclocross race!).

If you’re interested in more about me, you can check out my profile at Portland On Fire, a new project from Raven Zachary about Portland residents. Raven is planning to profile a new person every day this year. I’m January 6.

Also, don’t forget about PostgreSQL Conference East. Registration will open this week! The call for papers will be open until February 3, 2008. I’ve got my work cut out for me arranging all the details from here, but I’m looking forward to working with some great community members out in College Park, MD.

I’m giving a talk on January 17th, titled “10 new things you can use in PostgreSQL version 8.3”. Last week, I felt like PDXPUG was running itself — we’ve got the next six months of talks lined up already. I’ll be publishing our calendar over on the PDXPUG blog tomorrow.

conference, pgconference, postgres, postgresql

postgresql conference east 2008 – announcement

Joshua Drake sent out the announcement for the PostgreSQL Conference East ’08 just the other day. We’re both super excited about getting the community together in Maryland. I’m also really looking forward to meeting the many contributors living in that area for the first time.

I was originally drawn to the University of Maryland as a site for our conference because of UMLUG, a Linux student group. They had an intro to PostgreSQL and MySQL meeting in early November, and I’ve chatted a little with their enthusiastic President.

I’ve also been in touch with the Computer Science department. Professor Louiqa Raschid has been invaluable – getting me in touch with the department head, Professor Larry Davis. The UMD CS department is now sponsoring us! I’m looking forward to collaborating with the students and faculty to make this a fantastic conference.

Joshua has also posted the members list for our conference and speakers committees. If you have an idea for a talk or tutorial, please don’t hesitate to contact us! With the 8.3 beta available, and the release just around the corner, there are so many things out there to talk about. Keep the submissions coming!

pdxpug, postgres, postgresql, user groups, women 1 Comment

women’s sized t-shirts for postgresql

I have been looking into getting some woman-sized PostgreSQL shirts, in addition to the more typical men-sized tshirts. The particular style is American Apparel shirts, style # 2102. The shirt says ‘PostgreSQL’ in small print on the front, and has the big elephant logo on the back. We’ll most likely ask for a $20 donation to the PostgreSQL non-profit for each shirt.

So, I’m conducting a small poll:

If you are interested in a woman-sized shirt, please email or comment on this thread with a quantity, and size (XS, S, M, L, XL). If you would not wear a PostgreSQL woman-sized shirt yourself, please consider whether you would maybe get one as a gift for someone else this holiday season 🙂

I would be overjoyed to have my mailbox clogged with requests, so please don’t be shy!

I’m just trying to get a feel for the numbers, so your comment won’t be considered an order. Also, please forward this to anyone you think might be interested.

pdxpug, postgres, postgresql, sysadmin, user groups

ptop – meeting summary from last nights pdxpug

Last night’s meeting was about ptop and Mark Wong’s efforts to make an interactive, command-line tool for monitoring the current status of a PostgreSQL database.

For our meeting, Mark set up a test operating system on a USB drive, and bravely demo’d his new software.

Mark got the idea for ptop a few months ago, and went looking for the source code to top to get started. After a few days of hacking, he had a some useful features he wanted to share. So, he’s set up a project and started gathering developers:

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/ptop

The features currently supported include displaying:

  • Current queries
  • Query plans
  • Locks
  • User table statistics
  • User index statistics

Continue reading →

postgres, postgresql 7 Comments

automatic character set conversion in postgresql

Today, I encountered a few goofy characters in the data I am migrating from one ERP system to another. For example, “¢” isn’t represented the same way in UTF-8 as LATIN1 character sets. In UTF-8, the hex representation for “¢” is c2 a2, but in LATIN1 it is a2.

I started looking for an easy Perl way to translate everything into UTF-8 on the client side, when I discovered that PostgreSQL offers automatic client-to-server character set conversions. All I have to do is specify what my client character set is.

Here’s how you can do it with an SQL command:

SET CLIENT_ENCODING TO 'LATIN1';

Substitute your character set for “LATIN1”.

Lucky for me, my database is set to UTF8, and in that case, all supported encodings on my clients will be automatically converted to UTF-8 — as long as I specify which encoding I’m using.

The support for UTF-8 (formerly called UNICODE in the docs) in PostgreSQL has been around since version 7.1 (early 2000), and in version 8.1 the conversion support for UTF-8 was expanded to all known character sets.

conference, pdxpug, pgconference, portland, postgres, postgresql 2 Comments

conference audio is up!

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 audio is now available! Check it out.

I didn’t edit much, other than to eliminate break-time chatter. My apologies to Neil Conway — I missed about 10 minutes of his talk. Thank goodness for redundancy! Once I rip the video, I will update the audio and publish the whole thing.

I’m leaving early Sunday morning for a week. I’m taking a break from the interweb while I’m away. So, I look forward to catching up with everyone when I return.

conference, pdxpug, postgres, postgresql 3 Comments

conference aftermath: tired, happy

The conference was insanely great. We had incredible speakers, plentiful coffee, good food and amazing volunteers. I met so many new people and heard about a number of interesting projects that I’ll be following up on and writing about soon. Thank you to Joshua Drake and Josh Berkus for helping organize all of the big and small details.

Thank you to the sponsors:

  • Command Prompt, Inc. – and Joshua Drake for his talk on PL/Proxy
  • Continuent- and Robert Hodges in particular for giving his talk about uni/cluster
  • EnterpriseDB
  • Greenplum
  • Hyperic – nice to meet you John Walker!
  • OmniTi – and Robert Treat in particular for his talk on partitioning
  • Open Technology Group
  • Sun Microsystems, Inc. – and to Josh Berkus for his keynote on what’s new in version 8.3
  • Truviso – and Neil Conway for his talk about Query Execution, which many people wished could have continued
  • The Linux Fund – who also brought Kristine to help manage the registration desk

And special thanks to:

  • Stonehenge, Inc. – who sponsored afternoon snacks
  • Green Frog Consulting – Allen Bernstein recorded video all day
  • Portland State University and the Graduate Student Council – thanks for hosting us and special thanks to Rafael Fernández-Moctezuma for fixing the last-minute A/V problems, suggesting a coffee run in the afternoon, and just being MVP all day!
  • Daniel Browning – he took some fantastic pictures

Thank you everyone for making it happen! There were a few people that I started conversations with but inevitably got interrupted – please get in touch.

I’ve got a week of recovery (well, except for my presentation at Ignite on Thursday!), before I head off to New Orleans. I hope to have the audio from the conference available before I leave Sunday.

conference, open source, pdxpug, portland, postgres, postgresql, user groups 1 Comment

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 – only two more days

We’re taking care of all the last minute details – making sure we have enough coffee Saturday morning, getting nametags printed, stuffing folders and practicing (or in some cases finishing) talks.

I created a special page for my conference posts. I’ve included links to public transportation, all the maps to find your way to and from the conference location and the party, cab info, and links to all my other posts which have more detailed information.

There is free public wireless access inside the PSU engineering building. I’ll have information on how to connect when you arrive. Please send any questions you have to the attendees mailing list (here are the archives).

We are making video and audio recordings of the conference. I’ll announce here when they’re available and make them all available from the conference page.