Tag Archives: postgres

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PgCon Day 1: Developer meeting

Jan, talking about DDL triggers

I’m back from the developer meeting where we blasted through eight hours of presentations and discussions from key members of the PostgreSQL developer community.

One great outcome from the meeting is that WE ARE MOVING TO GIT.

There’s lots of other great stuff on that wiki notes – like a list of possible features for 9.1, plans for DDL triggers, and a continued discussion of snapshot cloning.

There was also much approval voiced for the alpha process that Peter Eisentraut championed last year.

I volunteered to steer our next “reviewfest” – kicking off June 15! And I’m trying to rope another developer into the next commitfest, which we anticipate starting on July 15. The plan is to stick with our development schedule from last year.

And I’m working with Josh Berkus to put together an open issues list for 9.0. I think I went a bit overboard, and many of the things I listed are probably resolved – hopefully committers will make quick work of the list, and we’ll be speeding along toward releasing 9.0 in June!

I missed out on the group picture, so I look forward to someone’s photo editing efforts in the near future. 🙂

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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!

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Cluster Developer Meeting recap

Cluster Developer Meeting

UPDATE: See bottom of post.

We held a PostgreSQL cluster developer meeting on Thursday, November 19, 2009 in Tokyo. About 25 people were in attendance, and seven projects presented status updates. Projects represented included pgCluster, PostgresForest, Postgres-R, Streaming Replication (slated to be included in core for version 8.5), Postgres-2 (not quite available), GridSQL, the Skype Skytools team (Londiste), Bucardo and Slony. Details of our discussions are being documented on the PostgreSQL wiki, and we’ve started a new mailing list.

The group of developers came up with a list of features that they would appreciate being implemented in Postgres soon, and we will be filling out the details in the coming weeks.

Our first milestone as a group is to create a detailed matrix of features to help users more easily navigate between the different solutions. I’m also going to arrange for a documentation sprint, dedicated to creating introductory documentation for new database administrators interested in clustering technology for Postgres. I’ll report out in December about how this work is going!

Josh has also posted a summary of the cluster meeting, and our next actions.

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OpenSQLCamp was awesome!

Saturday schedule 11/14/09

Thanks to everyone who attended OpenSQLCamp this past weekend in Portland, OR! More than 100 people participated – developers, DBAs and hobbyists from all over the world. Database developers participated from PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Drizzle, TokuDB, LucidDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB and many more.

The great thing about these events is the opportunity to trade ideas, code and stories. One project I’m very excited about is coming from some Portland State University students and a capstone project to create a new, interactive database client that works with more than just one DBMS. Igal gave a review of non-relational datastores. We had lightning talks about: open source column store databases, a many-master replication system called Trainwreck, open source at Microsoft, how to translate between NoSQL and SQL and many more.

You can see the full list of talks and notes from sessions as people update the wiki.

Joking about NoSQL aside, I was very happy to see many non-relational database developers in attendance, sharing information and participating in interesting discussions about the data management ecosystem. One meme we were happy to spread is that every tool has a purpose and I was happy to see this tweet:

Best thing I learned at #opensqlcamp today: #nosql vs. #sql is a false duality. Different features for different problem domains.

I hope next time we can get a few more core Postgres developers to a Camp. Mark Callaghan expressed interest in a comparison of backend storage mechanisms, and several people were interested in detailed comparisons of replication strategies across many DBMSes.

Thank you to everyone who participated! (sorry I spelled your name wrong in the email, Mark. And left off your name in the list of GoDaddy road-trippers, Dan.) If you were there, please give us feedback!

We’re already looking forward to the next OpenSQL Camp. Some people thought we should do it again in Portland – and we’d be happy to host again next year! Baron also mentioned running an event in Washington, D.C.

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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

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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