PgCon 2011: PL/Summit notes

Thank you all who participated in the PL/Summit. We spent about 5 hours together for discussions about PLs, and then a few more hours at the pub.

Also, thank you to Dan who supported the meeting and provided pizza. And thanks to SPI for funding travel for several hackers that could not have made it to PgCon otherwise.

The rough notes from the meeting are at:

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PgCon_2011_PL_Summit
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PL_Features_Matrix

I put a few TODOs out there based on discussions, and for a reminder to myself to follow up with folks that had good ideas.

Here’s the TODOs:
* Publish code for PL/NULL – Tim
* Make a list of all the boilerplate code – Selena will send email to -hackers about it
* Set up a 1/2 day meeting at the next pgcon – Josh Berkus
* Set up a Skype session in a few months time to go over progress – Selena (Tim, Alvaro agreed to attend)
* Further discussion of DDL triggers – Jan Wieck
* Further discussion of permission system – Steve Singer
* Further discussion of per-statement config parameters for things like timezone – Jan Urbanski

At PgCon 2011 – day 0

I wrote my review of synchronous replication over on Emma’s Tech blog (It’ll probably be published mid-day Tuesday). I’m visiting Ottawa this year on behalf of Emma, one of many great sponsors of Postgres’ yearly international developer conference, pgCon.

This week will be packed for me – attending the Clustering summit, the developers meeting, presenting about Emma’s database systems, leading the lightning talks, and of course attending the many parties this week.

Because we are spread so far around the globe, pgCon is often our one chance to get together and really dig into problems in-person.

And, I’m pulling together our first ever Procedural Language summit. With the new extension system, over 30 procedural languages implemented, and a ton of new features being added to existing PLs, I thought it was time PL developers should come together and have a chat. I’ve still got a few details to work out before Saturday (sorry all that RSVP’d – final agenda coming soon!).

I’m hoping to also have another, unrelated, announcement this Wednesday. Hopefully all the details come together!

Anyway, with that cliffhanger, I’m off to get a good night’s rest before the clustering summit tomorrow.

PL Developer Summit at PgCon, May 21!

UPDATE: We have 18 PLs. Added to the list from comments. 🙂

You’re probably aware that PostgreSQL supports a few procedural languages, PL/PgSQL being the most well-known for compatibility with Oracle’s PL/SQL.

Interest in PostgreSQL Procedural Languages (PLs) has grown significantly in the last few years and so PgCon is hosting a special PL summit on Saturday May 21, 2011.

Did you know that there are 17 other procedural languages are currently implemented?

  1. PL/Tcl and PL/Tclu
  2. PL/Perl and PL/Perlu
  3. PL/Python and PL/Pythonu
  4. PL/Ruby
  5. PL/Java
  6. PL/Lua
  7. PL/LOLCODE
  8. PL/Js
  9. PL/Proxy
  10. PL/PHP
  11. PL/sh
  12. PL/R
  13. PL/Parrot
  14. PL/scheme
  15. PL/Perl6
  16. PL/PSM
  17. PL/XSLT

And we have at least one proprietary PL from EnterpriseDB:

We invite PL developers, PostgreSQL core hackers, those interested in future PL development and PgCon attendees interested in learning more to attend!

Before we decided to create this summit, I put together a survey for PL developers. All survey respondents wanted a summit to happen!

The most popular topics were:

  • Postgres PL Interface Improvements
  • Connecting with other PL developers
  • New features in PLs
  • Hacking together
  • State of PLs
  • Distributions and builds
  • PG9.1 extensions vs PL languages
  • Security (pl vs plu)
  • PGXN

The most popular PLs were:

  • PL/PgSQL
  • PL/Perl
  • PL/Python
  • PL/R

The summit is open to attendees of PgCon and special guests. Please RSVP and help set the agenda.

The agenda and any results of the summit will be published on the wiki.