Tag Archives: postgres

pdxpug, portland, postgres, postgresql, user groups , , , , 4 Comments

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.

postgres, postgresql , , 7 Comments

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!

postgres, postgresql , , , 2 Comments

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!

postgres, postgresql , , , , 1 Comment

An opportunity for Postgres

I wrote up my thoughts on the opportunities for Postgres in light of the Oracle/Sun merger, and the response from our communities.

An excerpt:

As a developer and a sysadmin, my enthusiasm for Postgres comes directly from the people that work on the code. The love of their craft – developing beautiful, purpose-built code – is reflected in the product, the mailing lists and the individuals who make up our community.

When someone asks me why I choose Postgres, I have to first answer that it is because of the people I know who are involved in the project. I trust them, and believe that they make the best technology decisions when it comes to the core of the code.

I believe that there’s room for improvement in extending Postgres’ reach, and speaking to people who don’t already believe the same things that we believe: that conforming to the SQL standard is fundamentally a useful and important goal, that vertical scaling is an important design objective, and that consistency is just as important to excellent user experience as are verbose command names and syntactic sugar extensions.

Let me know what you think!

community, conference, open source, postgres, postgresql , , , , , 13 Comments

The future of free and open source support models

I attended the MySQL Conference all last week, and am feeling very excited about the future of open source databases. I had many interesting discussions and met a ton of Drizzle hackers I was lucky enough to spend Friday with, digging through code.

I was talking with Paul Vallée of the Pythian Group Thursday about Postgres and the future of enterprise support. And he showed me this great graph from indeed.com. It’s acceleration here, not the raw numbers – but still, a neat graph 🙂

We discussed the issues that enterprise customers with certain types of regulatory obligations encounter — such as contractual obligations for PCI-compliant credit card storage or outsourced management of sensitive data. The standard response developers might give for this is “read the spec, and make sure you implement it properly”. But the truth is, for larger companies, that may not be enough.

So, assuming for a moment that the Postgres community would even want to address this problem as a group — could it be possible for the Postgres community to provide the legal and financial assurances that an incredibly huge corporation (ahem – Sun/Oracle) can?

The short answer for Postgres right now is “no”.

Originally, I had thought just in term of liability, but Paul clarified:

The liability is just one component of what gives the guarantee meaning because there is a consequence to failed delivery. An SLA can also do this. As can a simple lucrative contract that can be lost, or canceled early if delivery does no take place. The key here is to ensure that the technology adopter can legitimately be confident that they are provably being responsible by adopting the platform. “I trusted” doesn’t cut it for many.

My view was that this type of agreement helps to determine who exactly is to blame (and who can be sued) in the event of a software failure. But, Paul said, “It’s more about assurance (with evidence) that obligations realistically will be met.”

I sometimes think that this system of liability and assurances is just ultimately broken. But it is a reality. So, would it be possible for us to come up with a new legal framework for community-driven software?

Paul brought up the idea of a cooperative, and that maybe such a legal entity could provide protection for individuals involved in supporting Postgres, and also shoulder some or all of the liability that a corporation using Postgres would want. I’m not sure that core developers of Postgres would join such a thing, or whether they would be allowed to given existing agreements they have with their own companies. But it is an interesting idea.

Creating a blueprint for this type of organization – hackers cooperatives – could be a way for truly community software to be developed across companies and among individuals in a sustainable, and “trustable” way. Maybe?

Continuing this train of thought – maybe these are non-governmental organizations, whose main purpose is to create and maintain infrastructure software for the good of the world.

Funding for mid-sized free and open source projects seems to be a consistent problem. Perhaps NGOs are a fair model for us.

I am curious about what effort may have already been made in this direction. My next step will be to contact Bradley Kuhn and see if there’s something out there that might address this.

conference, osbridge, postgres, postgresql, presentation, speaking , , , ,

Off to MySQL Con

I’m presenting a 25-minute talk on “Thinking about Performance” on Wednesday, around 5:25p at the Percona Performance Conference. My plan is to talk about performance testing and how to go about useful optimizations. This will be in the context of the PostgreSQL Performance Pad testing, and the performance-focused talks Mark Wong has been giving at Portland State University. Stop by if you get the chance – and you’re in San Jose! It’s free.

Robert Treat will be giving a talk on PostgreSQL at 11:15am that should be good, and we’re having a BoF during MySQL Con at 7:30pm. Quite a bit of Postgres-focused content at MySQL Con on Wednesday 🙂

I’m sad that I’ll be missing the Open Source Bridge Town Hall tomorrow night, but you should go! 🙂

conference, postgres, postgresql, presentation , , , , ,

Greg’s THREE talks at PostgreSQL Conference East

Greg Sabino Mullane will be presenting three talks at PostgreSQL Conference East this weekend in Philadelphia, at Drexel University. The talks are listed on the site, and here’s what he’ll be speaking about:

Bucardo
April 5, Sunday, 10am
Bucardo is a replication system for Postgres that uses triggers to asynchronously copy data from one server to many others (master-slave) or to exchange data between two servers (master-master). We’ll look at replication in general and where Bucardo fits in among other solutions, we’ll take a look at some of its features and use-cases, and discuss where it is going next. We’ll setup a running system along the way to demonstrate how it all works.

Monitoring Postgres with check_postgres.pl
April 4, Saturday, 2:30pm
What should you monitor? And how? We’ll look at the sort of things you should care about when watching over your Postgres databases, as well as ways to graph and analyze metadata about about your database, with a focus on the check_postgres.pl script.

The Power of psql
April 4, Saturday 10:30am
All about everyone’s favorite Postgres utility, psql, the best command-line database interface, period. We’ll cover basic and advanced usage.

I’ve seen a few of Greg’s talks — The Magic of MVCC, Cloning an elephant and a few others. He’s a great speaker and cool guy. And he’s my boss. But I’m not just saying that because he’s my boss! Really!

He doesn’t like to brag about himself, so I’m gonna help him out. He maintains DBD::Pg, check_postgres.pl, Bucardo and has had MANY patches committed to PostgreSQL. He’s also a volunteer for the PostgreSQL sysadmins team, and specifically helps maintain the git repo box. He’s a contributor to the MediaWiki project. He’s on the board of the United States PostgreSQL Association. He’s basically awesome.

If you’re gonna be there, you should check out his talks. And if you can’t make it, here’s hoping Josh Drake records the talks and shares them with us all! 🙂

community, pdxpug, pgcon, portland, postgres, postgresql, user groups , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Twitter and PostgreSQL!

Twitter: What are you doing?
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

On pgsql-general, Doug Hunley mentioned he’d created a twitter account for pgsql-announce! Way cool.

I’d written during last PgCon about Postgres and Twitter, and I figured it was time for a new list of Postgres-related people who I follow! Especially since a few people commented that Twitter was a waste of time last year 😉

If you’re on twitter (or identi.ca), and I missed you — please comment below!

Here we go (in no particular order):

  • Selena Deckelmann (me!)
  • Gabrielle Roth, member of PDXPUG, main force behind Code-N-Splode
  • Mark Wong, performance expert, leading the Portland PostgreSQL Performance Pad and associated projects to bring regular performance testing back to PostgreSQL
  • Francisco Figueiredo Jr., developer maintainer of Npgsql, speaker, member of PostgreSQL.Br
  • Magnus Hagander President of Pg.EU – the European Union non-profit organization dedicated to PostgreSQL and supporting user groups in the region
  • Josh Berkus, pgsql-advocacy leader, Member of the PostgreSQL core team
  • Jean-Paul Argudo, leader/member of PostgreSQL.Fr and Treasurer of Pg.EU
  • Hubert Lubaczewski , author of a great technical blog about PostgreSQL http://www.depesz.com/
  • Nikolay Samokhvalov, leader of the Moscow PostgreSQL Users Group, and consultant in Russia
  • Kristin Tufte, Postgres user, member of PDXPUG and assistant professor at Portland State University
  • Satoshi Nagayasu, member of the Japanese PostgreSQL Users Group, and spearheading meetups in Tokoyo
  • Brenda Wallace, moble gadget fetishist, Drupalista and Wellington, NZ PostgreSQL User Group wrangler
  • Isis Borges, Postgres enthusiast, works in the fashion industry in Puerto Alegre, Brazil
  • Dan Langille, DBA and organizer behind PgCon
  • Michael Brewer, DBA and board member of the United States PostgreSQL Association
  • Joshua Drake, business owner, board member of the United States PostgreSQL Association
  • Fábio Telles Rodriguez, active member of the PostgreSQL.Br (Brazil) and PgDay Brazil organizer. If you speak Portuguese, you can check out Planet Postgres Br here – http://planeta.postgresql.org.br/
  • Fernando Ike, member of PostgreSQL.Br
  • Ed Borasky, PhD, analytics nerd, PDXPUG member
  • Robert Treat, author of PHP and PostgreSQL book, speaker, on the board of the United States PostgreSQL Association
  • David Wheeler, contributed citext most recently to PostgreSQL, consultant, maintainer of Bricolage, formerly of I Want Sandy
  • Greg Sabino Mullane, author of Bucardo and check_postgres.pl, maintainer of DBD::Pg, recently contributed patches to psql, on the board of the United States PostgreSQL Association, my boss 🙂
  • Christophe, volunteer at OSCON for PostgreSQL booth, DBA
  • Aaron Thul, DBA, developer, speaker on PostgreSQL on Drugs 🙂
  • David Fetter, DBA, maintainer of the PostgreSQL Weekly News
  • Elein Mustain, DBA, speaker, maintainer of http://varlena.com
  • Chris May, DBA, member of PDXPUG
  • Jason Kirtland, developer, maintainer of SQLAlchemy, Pythonista
  • Josh Tolley, developer, DBA, statistics nerd, author of PL/LOLCODE and pgsnmpd
  • Erik Jones, Portland resident, Pythonista, made a cool python-based partitioning tool (pgpartitioner)
  • Nicholas Kreidberg, Nevada resident, PostgreSQL user
  • Gavin Roy, DBA, Business dude, Myyearbook.com, speaker, on the board of of United States PostgreSQL Association
  • Chris Browne, Slony maintainer
  • Douglas Hunley, creator of pgsql_announce on twitter 🙂
  • Larry Rosenman, PostgreSQL supporter, help with DNS for PostgreSQL.org, contributor (some of the syslog* stuff in version 7.0)

Organizations:

conference, postgres, postgresql, scale , , , , 4 Comments

Report from SCaLE 7x

DSC_0079
Awesome booth volunteers Noel and Erez!

In the elevator this morning, a person asked me if I was with the SCaLE conference. He started by saying that he was really happy that we (the people attending the conference) were there, and that he hoped for Linux to be successful. And then he said, “I’m a linux supporter, but I’m a windows captive.”

Because I work every day with free software, I lose touch with people who feel trapped by their operating system. That moment in the elevator reminded me that not everyone is as lucky as I am!

This is my second year attending SCaLE. I’m just as excited as I was last year about the number of end users, systems administrators, and enthusiastic supporters of free and open source software. During Joe Brockmeier’s keynote, he asked the crowd to raise their hands if they were already contributing to an open source project, and less than 1/3 of the crowd raised their hands. Other conferences I attend seem to attract mostly people who are already contributors. I’m very happy to see SCaLE having a wider reach.

My favorite event was definitely the PostgreSQL LAPUG birds of a feather session on Saturday evening. We filled the room and had to fetch chairs from outside! Josh Berkus and Magnus Hagander provided some great slides that I used for a quick tour through new SQL programming, administrative and security features in the upcoming release of 8.4. This presentation was basically a tag team effort between myself and Josh.

More than 3/4 of the people had never attended a PostgreSQL user group meeting before, and I hope to hear that they all subscribe to the mailing list and attend some meetings!

We had great traffic at the Postgres booth. There were a surprising number of people who asked about migrating from MSSQL to Postgres. Fortunately, we had at least one person with a fair amount of Windows experience at the booth (Thanks, John!). I also was grateful that many people stopped by with follow up questions about the filesystems I/O talk I gave. I really felt like it was well received, and I hope that we end up with a few new recruits to our testing.

Great show! And now I’m off to relax downstairs before I work a downtime this evening 🙂