Thanks to one of Audrey’s RSS feeds, I read Women in Computer Science – An Endangered Species of a New Kind? this afternoon. About the same time, I received email from a professor at UMD who is helping organize PostgreSQL Conference East. She would like to hold a Women in Open Source Focus Group session during the conference, and we’re looking for participants.
Tag Archives: postgres
PostgreSQL User Group Liaison – that’s me!
Last week, I accepted the role of User Group Liaison for PostgreSQL in North America. Thanks, Joshua Drake, for nominating me. And thanks to everyone who commented on the thread. I was smiling for a couple days from the nice things that were said.
My first task is to upgrade the now elderly PUGS server – the site for our User Group blogs. Look for an updated site on Monday!
I will be attending SCALE on February 8-10. I’ll definitely be seeing talks from the Women in Open Source track, hanging out at the PostgreSQL Booth, and attending the LA PostgreSQL Users Group BoF session at 8pm, Saturday February 9 in the Laguardia room. See you there!
Update: I made the PostgreSQL Weekly News!
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.
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!
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.
ptop hackathon, this saturday
We’re getting together at my place to work on ptop on Saturday at Noon. Get in touch if you’d like to join in. We’ll have room for 4-5 more people. It’s going to be at my place, so for directions just email me, Mark or Gab.
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
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 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 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.