Category Archives: postgresql

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Perl Mongers, Open SQL Camp and JPUG 10th anniversary coming up

Just asking.

I’ve got a busy couple of weeks in November:

  • November 11, 2009 – I’m presenting Bucardo (a sweet replication system for Postgres) at the Portland Perl Mongers group, 7pm at Free Geek.
  • November 13-14, 2009 – I’ll be helping run OpenSQL Camp with Eric Day here in Portland, OR. We’re having it at Souk, and kicking things off on Friday night at Old Town Pizza, starting around 6pm. Eric asked about having an n-master (multi-multi-multi…etc master) replication session, so I might talk with him about that there.
  • November 19, 2009 – PostgreSQL Clustering Summit in Tokyo. I’ll be giving a 5-minute presentation on the state of Bucardo development, and meeting (or seeing again!) the major contributors to replication and clustering technology for Postgres.
  • November 20-21, 2009 – Japanese PostgreSQL User Group 10th Anniversary Summit. I’ll be presenting a talk on User Groups with Magnus Hagander, President of PostgreSQL Europe.

I’m happy to say that I’ve got my slide decks done well in advance this time, and am mostly working on example configurations. I started a repo on github to hold my bucardo examples. Enjoy!

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GSoC Mentor Summit and the new mentor’s manual

4040234286_8cfb2f4708

I’ve been in San Jose since Wednesday, working on a book and preparing for today’s Google Summer of Code Mentor’s Summit. We’re here at Google’s campus, setting up the schedule and meeting new and old friends.

A group of us – me, Jen, Alex, Bart, Jonathan, Leslie and Olly – worked with Adam Hyde from Flossmanuals.net to create a new GSoC mentoring guide. We “book sprinted”, writing the entire manual in two days. Leslie was nice enough to produce printed copies for attendees, and the whole thing is available online at: http://en.flossmanuals.net/GSoCMentoringGuide. Flossmanuals.net is pretty cool — you can create epub books, PDFs and beautiful looking printed books quite easily.

I was happy to reference the patch review process from PostgreSQL in the ‘upstream integration‘ chapter.

We’d love comments, feedback and contributions to the manual!

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User Group Idea: The After-party

sombrero

User group meetings are fundamentally places for people to meet each other. My user groups have rituals – we start off by asking a silly question of everyone as an ice breaker, we introduce our speakers with something personal, and we end every meeting with a trip to a local pub. This is the after-party, an essential part of the user group experience.

I’ve been to some conferences that don’t properly plan for the after party. I’m sure some of you have too. And it’s a bummer! You just spent 6-8 hours with a bunch of people, learning stuff — and now you want to go somewhere and really *talk* about it.

The same thing happens during user group meetings. People came there because they were interested in the topic – and the people that knew something about that topic, or maybe just interested in finding like-minded people.. and after the presentation and discussion is done, they want to connect directly with the other people that are there.

The best way to facilitate this is to have food, something to drink (and it doesn’t need to be alcoholic, but that *does* tend to help people loosen up), and an unstructured, social environment that helps people talk to each other. Pubs are set up for this (tables, some amount of comfortable ambient noise, booze and usually food), as are coffee houses. Even someone’s living room will do!

Just remember – a user group meeting is about getting people together to meet each other, not just to hear a great speaker, or even to learn a particular skill. My goal is always to enable conversation and connections between individuals, because that’s the community-glue that will keep a group together and thriving long after the original inspiration fades.

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Snow Leopard and PostgreSQL: installation help links

snow_leopard_yvonne_n_1968

A few reports of issues have been raised on the mailing lists around upgrading to Snow Leopard. There have been some good tutorials and hints posted on blogs that aren’t in the planet.postgresql.org roll, so here are a few things that might help you out:

Photo courtesy of yvonne_n_1968, under a Creative Commons license

community, postgres, postgresql, user groups , , , 1 Comment

User Group Idea: Present what you do for work

Ta da!

Ta da!

One consistently interesting topic for our PDXPUG meetings has essentially been show and tell. Presenters answer the question: what is it that I do for work?

We’ve had oceanography, GIS, relational algebra and even MySQL presentations that stem from this idea.

For the most part, those of us who do database work are so specialized that we might gloss over the details of our job to avoid boring our friends and colleagues to death. The fact is though, much of the work that we do *can* be made interesting for 30 or 45 minutes. And what better forum than a group of dedicated database geeks?

Some angles I’ve seen work are:

  • Giving background on the how and why of data collection (for example: Discussing probes that collect location, temperature and salinity in the ocean: how they communicate back to the mainland, data quality issues, failure modes);
  • Explaining a schema design and sample queries that work with it;
  • Going through a refactoring exercise with an existing database;
  • Describing a particularly difficult to deal with problem or incident (database migrations!) and how you did (or didn’t) solve the issues that occurred along the way;
  • Turning your meeting topic into a drinking game.

Our favorite meeting topic for drinking games is relational algebra.

The important thing about these types of presentations is that the person presenting picks the most interesting parts of their job to talk about. Enthusiasm for work shines through, and draws in the audience — a great thing when you haven’t given many presentations.

What are some topics you’ve seen, or would like to see covered related to a person’s day job?

Photo courtesy of exfordy, via Creative Commons license

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User Group Idea: Patch Review Party

On Tuesday, I invited a group of people from PDXPUG over to my house for chili, beer and patch review. PostgreSQL has what we’re calling a ‘commitfest‘ every two months where we buckle down and try to review and commit (or reject) the patches submitted over the last few weeks. Webb and Gabrielle had the original idea to get everyone together for a review party, and they did a fantastic job recruiting people to join in.

Gabrielle gave the details and lessons learned on our PUG site already, so I won’t repeat that.

One thing that occurred to me as we were doing this work was how affirming and *fun* it is to work on patch review with people in person. Several people commented on how they enjoyed doing this work in the company of others, and how the tedious issues around compiling, applying patches and going through all the questions were made so much more enjoyable with a group of good-natured hackers sitting around answering questions.

The atmosphere wasn’t pressured – I gave a little background about commitfest, how it’s been run in the past and what the development group is trying to change about it (mainly, bring in more people, and make patch review faster for people who submit patches, and smoother for the committers). Then we just got down to work in pairs or groups of three.

Working in pairs is a really good idea for this type of event. I certainly learned a few things from John, and over email and in-person again, we were able to wrap our review up a couple days later after the regular user group meeting. Having another person to bounce questions off of was invaluable for the patch that we reviewed, and it was just fun brainstorming variable names, piecing together a test case and then finding a solution to a problem we found.

Another thing that happened was that I had lots of time to chat with people I hadn’t talked with before about projects they’re working on (a really exciting materialized view implementation, and a massive cleanup of our *.bki infrastructure — two very ambitious projects!). Both people are now signed up to give talks at our local user group about their work.

I’ve talked a little bit about the social benefits of commitfest on various mailing lists, and I think the opportunity for user groups to get together and review patches as a team is a great one. I’ll be gathering up some of my other observations about PostgreSQL community and posting those over the next few weeks.

I’ve got a talk about user groups to prepare for (JPUG’s 10th anniversary in November!), so now is the perfect time for me to be gathering my experiences and thoughts from the last three years.

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OpenSQL Camp comes to Portland! November 14-15, 2009

I’m happy to announce that Portland, OR will be host to the next OpenSQL Camp, Portland. We’ll be holding it November 14-15, 2009.

Patterned after the first Open SQL camp held in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, in November 2008, we’re inviting any and all database practitioners (even the non-SQL, non-relational ones!) to join us for two days of deep database geeking.

To quote:

Attendees of this conference are mostly open source developers and end users/open source enthusiasts. The goal of this event is to spread the word about the vibrant communities and large ecosystems around Open Source Databases and to educate the attendees about what alternatives exist to commercial databases. It is a place where people come to learn, to participate and to contribute. In other words, it’s a great conference, and if you attend, it will be better.

And to quote Eric Day:

There are direct flights to Portland from many locations in the US, and the venue is
right off public transportation (train), so it should be convenient for everyone to get to.

We’ve decided on a place in Downtown Portland (which we’ll announce shortly), and are actively looking for sponsors to help fuel the camp. If you’re a database company, looking to connect with database hackers or just want to support the spread of database-fu, get in touch to sponsor OpenSQL Camp, Portland!

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Offline community, PUGs updates

Just before heading off to PgCon, I wrote about offline community and how it has positively impacted the tech community in Portland, OR. Specifically, I talked about the factors I thought encouraged women to participate.

My own experience with Postgres has been incredibly positive and welcoming. I always wish that I had more time to contribute.

I did find a little time this weekend to upgrade the PostgreSQL User Group site to the latest supported version of Drupal. We’re still on version 5.x, and hopefully I’ll be able to upgrade that to version 6.x soon. We’ve had a few problems with spammers, but I added a CAPTCHA that I hope isn’t too annoying for everyone.

If you have ideas for how to display the information on the PUGs site in a better way, please get in touch. I have a couple things I’d like to add soon – like a map of locations, and a better preview of recently posted articles.

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

PgCon 2009: Lighning Talks! Call for participation

Ottawa is almost as pretty as Portland this time of year.

Ottawa is almost as pretty as Portland this time of year.

Can you believe it? PgCon 2009 is nearly here!

We need lightning talks for our Lightning Talks session at PgCon in Ottawa, Ontario next week!

I have a few talks lined up (there’s really only time for about 10 of them!), but we need MORE! Lightning talks are FIVE MINUTE presentations. If you’ve never given a talk before, this is a great way to get your feet wet. If you have a last minute awesome thing to share, now is your time to do it!

Anything PostgreSQL related – code, stories, announcements — just send your topics to me! Comment below or email me: selena -at- postgresql -dot- org.

I’ll post talks as they are confirmed here: http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PgCon_2009_Lightning_talks

Hope to see you at PgCon!