Tag Archives: talk

postgres, postgresql, presentation, speaking , , , , , ,

OSCON: Postgres represent! And my links for Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger talk

I’m giving a couple talks at OSCON this year. The first is on Tuesday, 10:40am room C123: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: Postgres 9.1. The other is Mistakes were Made, Wednesday at 1:40pm in room D136.

My colleague Robert Treat is giving a Pro PostgreSQL workshop Wednesday at 1:40pm too, room 204. He’s also giving a Scalability Patterns talk at 4:20pm Tuesday. I’m sure his talks will be awesome. 🙂

And here are the rest of the talks tagged with PostgreSQL.

Also remember — there’s a PgDay tomorrow at the Oregon Convention Center!

I’m pushing my examples for my 9.1 talk into a github repo. It should be populated with whatever I decide to use for the talk by Monday evening.

Building 9.1 for me on Mac OS X (leopard!) involved the following:


git tag -l | grep REL9_1
git checkout REL9_1_BETA2
./configure --with-perl --with-python --prefix=/opt/pg91beta2 --with-readline
make
make install

Normal caveats apply – you need X Code of a reasonably recent version, and a bunch of support libraries to make this happen. I haven’t rebuilt from scratch on OS X in a long time, but now I realize that maybe I aught to go through the pain and document this again.

But I digress!

I have a long list of resources for this talk and wanted to share. Probably in the slides for the talk, I’ll provide shortlinks so that people can pull them up and read instead of listening to me 😀

Here’s my links:

And if you’re wondering about the title, I took it from an great Daft Punk song that fans have created some epic videos of:

community, conference, open source, postgres, postgresql, presentation , , , , , , 6 Comments

Simon Riggs just rocked my world.

I’m in Brussels for the FOSDEM conference, hanging out at the PostgreSQL booth, meeting my European colleagues, and running into friends.

PostgreSQL has a developer’s room and Simon Riggs just wrapped up a talk about Replication. I sincerely hope that the video of the talk turned out well, because it was the most inspiring and technically interesting talk I have seen in a very long time. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of the slides at the moment, but word is that they will be posted on the BSD wiki soon.

Simon focused on new features in 8.4 that affect file-based replication, also mentioning streaming, synchronous replication — which will not be included in 8.4, but is being actively worked on. He explained his rationale for objecting to the inclusion of the synchronous replication patches, mostly, I think, based on the complexity of the WAL archiving required as it was implemented.

Then, Simon launched into an in-depth tour of the issues and solutions brought about during his team’s work on Hot Standby. Hot Standby allows read-only queries to be made against a file-based replication enabled Postgres server, known as Point-in-time recovery and WAL Shipping in the Postgres documentation.

Simon started work on PITR-related patches about five years ago, and continues that work with others today.

One fascinating aspect of the hot standby patches is that they ultimately caused performance improvements in sub-transactions across the board – and will likely cause up to 5% improvement in that code path. There were other performance improvements, but I’ll wait for the slides to mention those. At several times during the talk, Simon pointed out features that Postgres has that no other database has — such as multiple options for dealing with conflicts in hot standby (freezing, conflict resolution and timeout).

At the end of the talk, Simon spent a few minutes talking about how Postgres is capable of being the best database, not just the best open source database. And how all the people in the room were capable of contributing as he had. He claimed that prioritization and aiming to work on the biggest, most interesting problem you can are all you need. And he claimed that all that made him different was that he was a little more persistent about solving problems.

Rock on, Simon.

community, linux, plug, user groups , , , , , ,

User Groups redux

lousy cup!
actually, i love this cup. thanks, eric! 🙂

It’s a bit late for an “announcement”, but Gabrielle and I are re-presenting the User Groups talk to the Portland Linux Users Group tonight. We’re all about audience participation, and so we’re going to focus on helping PLUG pick a few topics and presenters for upcoming meetings. And whatever else they want to talk about 🙂

Meeting starts at 7pm and here’s where:

Fariborz Maseeh College of Engineering & Computer Science Building
Room FAB 86-01 (This is in the basement.)
The building is on SW 4th across from SW College Street.
See location H-10 on map at http://pdxLinux.org/campus_map.jpg

Beer afterward at Jax!

Jax Bar And Restaurant
826 SW 2nd Avenue