Archive for 2017

Welcome to a new and bigger year for Postgres in 2018!

As our events have grown and evolved, so has our branding. We started as a small pgDay event, grown to a larger pgConf and now we are happy to announce that we matured into a full week long event called PostgresConf.

PostgresConf US 2018 is focused on People, Postgres and Data. People are the driving force behind the Postgres Ecosystem from the hackers writing the code, to the advocates telling the world about Postgres and to the administrators and developers using Postgres day to day. They will all be represented at PostgresConf.

 

Tickets

We have excellent news for you all: registration is open for PostgresConf US 2018 and discounted Early Bird tickets are just $399 -- $200 off the regular $599 -- and available through January 31, 2018, at https://postgresconf.org/conferences/2018

Please note that the early bird registration admits one person to the main conference sessions on Wednesday April 18 - Friday April 20, 2018, the Regulated Industry Summit, the Greenplum Summit, the Community Summit, and all evening activities from Wednesday - Friday. This registration does NOT include any training sessions on Monday April 16 or Tuesday April 17. Tickets for the training sessions are available separately, at $199 for half-day training and $499 for a full day training.

Day passes will be available for single day admission Wednesday through Friday, for $299 -- why not register early and get all 3 days for just $100 more?!


About our Conference

The Postgres Ecosystem is more than just the exceptional PostgreSQL database. It encompasses tools, solution, and services that enterprises demand for their mission-critical applications. PostgresConf brings the whole ecosystem under a single roof so enterprises can learn about all of the possible ways Postgres can be used in their environments.
 
This year, we are back in Jersey City from April 16th to April 20th at The Westin Jersey City Newport.  We also listened to our past attendees and expanded our training classes to 2 days so on April 16th and 17th, we are pleased to offer training sessions taught by professional trainers to bring additional depth to your learning experience. That will be followed by 3 days of great talks on April 18th - 20th. Additionally, we will host our 4th annual Regulated Industry Summit as well as the inaugural Greenplum Summit.

CFP

Want to present?  Our CFP is open!  Please visit https://postgresconf.org/conferences/2018 for Call for Papers information.  

Where to Stay

For those planning to attend, don’t forget to book your room early for the best rates. The Westin Jersey City Newport is the best place to stay and enjoy all conference activities. Attendees will surely mingle at the Westin bar and hallways throughout the afternoon and long into the evening. We have reserved a block of rooms at the special conference rate of $260/night plus applicable taxes for attendees who make their reservations via this dedicated Westin booking page. The hotel block will fill up quickly. The special rates will be available until March 26 or until the group block is sold out. 

 

Sponsors

Sponsorship opportunities for the conference are still available. If your business PostgreSQL based products or services or if you are looking to recruit a PostgreSQL expert at our job fair, this is the place to be. Don’t miss your chance to be part of this dynamic and growing ecosystem. Download the sponsorship prospectus at:
https://postgresconf.org/conferences/2018/sponsorships

Our current premium sponsors are:

Diamond: Amazon Web Services, Pivotal
Platinum: Compose, OpenSCG, 2ndQuadrant, Microsoft
Gold: Cybertec, JetBrains, Citus Data, EnterpriseDB

For more information, please visit https://postgresconf.org/conferences/2018

We look forward to seeing you in April!
 
Joshua D. Drake     December 19, 2017


How do you use Postgres?

I work Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and within Fred Hutch, I work for the largest group called SCHARP, Statistical Center for HIV/AIDS Research and Prevention. We use Postgres to monitor the AIDS drug trials real time to see if the trials are working or not. This means we collect the data from doctors and labs around the world, and analyzing the data. We also have servers where we receive data from other research institutes and share our randomized data, de-personalized, with other research institutes.


What community contributions have you provided?

In 2010 I started SeaPUG, Seattle Postgres Users Group, at the request of Josh Drake. I have at least have the presentations there every year. I have also discovered several PostgreSQL: bugs which have been fixed. Some of them affected every version of PostgreSQL. Bug numbers: 7553, 8173, 8257, 8291. I also found 8545, which has not been fixed but Core has acknowledge needs to be fixed but they are not sure where it should be fixed, pg_dump or pg_dumpall. I started the PostgreSQL track at LinuxFest Northwest in 2014 after my GIS presentation in 2013 was standing room only. This year I got a booth at the SeaGL, Seattle GNU Linux, conference with the idea of having a booth there next year along with also doing a PostgreSQL presentation next year at the conference.


You recently took a renewed interest in speaking at Postgres Conferences, why?

I have been giving presentations locally now for the last 7 years and so I am now ready to move on to the next step, doing presentations at the Local and National conferences around the United States.


What is the #1 barrier you see to Postgres adoption?

People not knowing about PostgreSQL, most people know about MYSQL, MSSQL and Oracle, but do not know about PostgreSQL. This is changing, some, with the Cloud providers now offering PostgreSQL, but I go to these conferences, LinuxFest Northwest and SeaGL, and people all the time are asking me, "What is Postgres and why should I use it over MYSQL, MSSQL or Oracle", because they have never heard of PostgreSQL.


What is something you feel the wider Postgres community could be better at?

We need to promote PostgreSQL so that new people starting personal projects and starting at companies, will think about PostgreSQL before other databases. This starts with getting the younger generation interested in PostgreSQL and that also means that we need to get the college professors willing to talk about PostgreSQL in their curriculums instead of ignoring PostgreSQL for all the other competing databases. Some of this means that at all the other conferences, we need to have a PostgreSQL presence, aka booth and presentations. We should also come up with a certification method for PostgreSQL DBA's, User's, Engineer's, etc so that prospective employers will have an idea of the prospective employees skill set.

Joshua D. Drake     December 12, 2017

We are having yet another PGConf Mini in NYC. The event is scheduled for December 14th, 2017 and Work Bench is hosting:

 
 
The event is part of the PGConf Mini series and is free to attend. The PGConf Mini series works directly with user groups and external communities to organize events for the local community. The events are held as a larger meetup style event with networking opportunities and up to 4 presentations. The current agenda for the latest PGConf Mini: NYC is:
 
Agenda: 
 
• 6:30 - 7:00: Jonathan Katz, (TBD), Postgresql Contributor and PGConf Chair Emeritus

Efficiently and Safely Propagate Data Changes Without Triggers!

 

Prior to PostgreSQL 9.4, the primary way to distribute data-driven changes across multiple tables was to use triggers. While triggers guarantee that these changes will be propagated, they can have a significant impact application performance, both technically and with development time (see: "debugging"). PostgreSQL 9.4 introduced logical decoding, which provides a way to stream all changes in a database to a consumer. Using a logical decoder, you can read all changes that are made in a table into your programming language of choice to perform many tasks: cache invalidation, data propagation, submitting changes to remote services, and more. Many PostgreSQL drivers, such as psycopg2 and JDBC support the logical replication protocol, which lets you easily stream your database changes to be manipulated using your favorite programming language. This talk will demonstrate how you can setup logical decoding for your application, look at architecture strategies for working with a logical decoder, and look at a case-study that shows how using logical decoding led to a big performance boost over a similar trigger-based system.
 
• 7:00 - 7:30:  Kevin Jernigan, Senior Product Manager, Amazon
Technical Architecture of Postgres Aurora 
 
Amazon Aurora is a cloud-optimized relational database that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. The recently announced PostgreSQL-compatibility, together with the original MySQL compatibility, are perfect for new application development and for migrations from overpriced, restrictive commercial databases. In this session, we’ll do a deep dive into the new architectural model and distributed systems techniques behind Amazon Aurora, discuss best practices and configurations, look at migration options and share customer experience from the field. 
 
• 7:30 - 8:20: Joshua (JD) Drake POSTPONED due to flight cancellation)
The Power of Postgres Replication, Postgres Expert - Lead Consultant Command Prompt, Inc and Co-Chair PGConf!
 
With PostgreSQL v10 a new replication engine has come to town. Let's explore Postgres Logical Replication, how to use it, optimize it and let it best fit in with your organization. We will also discuss its interactions with external tools as well as Binary Replication and features such as Hot Standby. 
 
 
 
 
Joshua D. Drake     November 20, 2017

It is with great pleasure that we announce the preliminary program for PGConf Local: Austin!


We have received a plethora of positive feedback from the local Postgres and Data communities and we are proud to host a second PGConf event held in Austin in 2017.

Training Opportunity:
Breakout Sessions:
  • Event Sourcing with a Postgres Event Store by Scott Bellware
  • Using GIS in PostgreSQL by Lloyd Albin
  • Trees/Hierarchical Data in the SQL Database by Ryan Murphy
  • Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility by James Finnerty
  • Deep Dive into the RDS PostgreSQL Universe by Grant McAlister
  • Open Source Communities as Biological Ecosystems by Debra Cerda
  • The Power of Postgres Replication by Joshua D. Drake
  • Multi-cloud deployment of PostgreSQL in minutes. by Stephen Holt

PGConf Local: Austin is made possible by the wonderful team of volunteers including the Austin PostgreSQL User Group and our sponsors:



Diamond2

Platinum: Compose.IO, OpenSCG, 2ndQuadrant, and Microsoft
Joshua D. Drake     November 09, 2017

Andreas Scherbaum recently tweeted, “Speakers: it is NOT OK to even consider drinking alcohol during a talk! No matter how complicated your talk topic is.” The tweet has caused an interesting debate on Twitter and Facebook. It also caused me to run a poll via @amplifypostgres on the matter.

At the time of this writing almost 70% of the votes on the poll either don’t care or don’t think it is unprofessional for a presenter to drink alcohol while presenting.

One of the counter arguments to presenters consuming alcohol during presentations is that when you are presenting you are representing the conference. The conference wants you to be professional and create an environment that represents that during your talk. Fair enough, but why is it unprofessional?

This sequence of events has me wondering: what is professionalism in reference to presenting at Postgres Conferences? It is certainly not appropriate to be intoxicated while presenting at a professional conference, but that isn’t the question. The question is: why is it inappropriate for an adult to make a legal choice to take a nip or sip beer (or wine) during a presentation? Why is that more unprofessional than not wearing a tie or button up shirt, or wearing shorts or a kilt?

Professionalism is subjective.


In my opinion, my obligations to the audience are:
  • I must care about the content.
  • I must deliver what I say I will deliver.
  • I must be honest with the audience about my level of experience in the subject.
  • I must be honest about my opinions on the subject.
  • I must be a genuine version of me, minus the swearing.”
I fail at “minus the swearing” but the rest are spot on and should be our focus.

If you do not want presenters to consume alcohol during their presentations, then add it to your Code of Conduct. If it’s not in your Code of Conduct, then let adults take responsibility for themselves and present the best content possible for our community, in whatever way necessary.

Rock on and @amplifypostgres!

Disclaimer: I am writing this opinion as a frequent presenter, not as the Co-Chair of the most electrifying Postgres Conference in the world.


Joshua D. Drake     October 27, 2017

 

Image result for seattle hd wallpaper


It is with great pleasure that we announce the final program for PGConf Local: Seattle. The schedule is still being hammered out but we have finalized the content that will be presented. Please join us in celebrating Postgres in Seattle!

 
The conference is the first Postgres event to be held in Seattle since 2009 and we have received a lot of positive feedback from the local Postgres and Data communities. Clearly Postgres has been missed in the Emerald City!
 
Training Options:
Breakout Sessions:

Track: Ops

  • Develop intelligent apps on the Azure platform using the Azure Database for PostgreSQL by Sunil Kamath
  • Tuning PostgreSQL for High Write Workloads by Grant McAlister
  • POSTGRESQL V10: AN AMPLIFIED VERSION OF POSTGRES by Joshua D. Drake
  • Enterprise Data Architecture with PostgreSQL by Kevin Kempter
  • All the dirt on Vacuum by Jim Nasby
  • Building a scalable time-series database on PostgreSQL by Matvey Arye

Track: Dev

  • Semantic Search Web System on PostgreSQL by QUAN-HA LE
  • Increase Application Performance with SQL Auto-Caching; No Code Changes by Roland Lee
  • Introduction to JavaScript Stored Procedures by Jim Mlodgenski
  • Under the hood: API integrations and more in an energy efficiency PostgreSQL + Django application by Jennifer Scheuerell
  • Using GIS in PostgreSQL by Lloyd Albin

Tracks: Big Data, Data Science and AWS/Cloud

  • With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility by Michael Sacks
  • Data Quality Expert Is Not Harvard's Sexiest Job...But... by Ben Rogojan
  • GRAKN.AI: the hyper-relational database for knowledge-oriented systems by Haikal Pribadi
  • Best Practices with Managed PostgreSQL in the Cloud by Jignesh Shah
PGConf Local: Seattle is made possible by the wonderful team of volunteers including the Seattle Postgres User Group and our sponsors:
 
 
Diamond2
 
Platinum: Compose.IO, OpenSCG, 2ndQuadrant, and Microsoft
Joshua D. Drake     October 19, 2017

We just announced the dates and the CFP for PGConf 2018, our 7th Postgres Conference in the New York City area. We are back at the Westin in Jersey City April 16th-20th again this year just across the river from Manhattan and an easy PATH ride to all things New York. As we learn from year to year, we evolve based on our attendees and sponsors feedback. This biggest change we are doing this year is expanding the program to be a full 5 days. Our attendees have asked for even more training so we are now starting on Monday with several full-day training classes. We will then roll into half-day tutorials on Tuesday and the full conference schedule starting on Wednesday.


Other changes you will see this year is the 4th Annual Regulated Industry Summit will now be part of the main program. A number of people who wanted to attend the RIS also wanted to attend the tutorials so we removed that conflict while opening up the RIS to a wider audience. Along with RIS, we are hosting two additional summits. Thanks to one of our Diamond Sponsors, Pivotal, we will have the inaugural Greenplum Summit to bring together the best in Big Data, Massively Parallel Processing (MPP), Machine Learning, Graph, AI and Spatial Analytics centered around the Open Source, Postgres derived Greenplum database. Finally, we are having the Open Source Summit for our fellow local Open Source communities with data related technologies such as Python, R and Ruby.

All of this wouldn't be possible without our sponsors:

Diamond2

Diamond

Platinum:        Compose, OpenSCG, 2ndQuadrant, Microsoft
Gold:              JetBrains, Cybertec, Citus, EnterpriseDB
Silver:            Command Prompt

Save the date and submit a talk at:
https://pgconf.org/conferences/2018

Jim Mlodgenski     October 18, 2017

The International Postgres conference  series continues to grow! PGConf APAC 2018 is the latest PGConf.Org addition.

Following the success of two consecutive pan-Asia Postgres event - pgDay Asia 2016 and pgDay Asia 2017 held along with FOSSASIA, we are pleased to announce PGConf APAC 2018 to be held in Singapore from 22nd to 24th of March, 2018. Once again the conference will be held along with FOSSASIA - one of the largest FOSS conference on the planet. PGConf APAC will be PostgreSQL conference series for all PostgreSQL enthusiasts and users in the Asia Pacific region.
For more details on FOSSASIA - http://2018.fossasia.org
You will be able to enjoy one of the largest PostgreSQL conference in Asia and one of the largest FOSS conferences to meet like minded individuals in the same week!
pgDay Asia 2016 and pgDay Asia 2017 would not have been possible without your awesome talks and we would like to invite speakers from all over the globe to present at the PGConf APAC 2018. We would like to open Call For Paper for PGConf APAC 2018. Some of the topics which can be used for submitting a talk are-
  1. Migration projects
  2. Performance troubleshooting and tuning
  3. noSQL and geo-spatial features of Postgres
  4. Unique use-case and customer stories
  5. Useful new features in PostgreSQL 10
For more examples you can refer to the papers which were presented at last year's event - 2016 and 2017.
Of course we are happy to accept paper proposals on any other interesting topics as well.
To submit you proposal for presentation please go to this link - http://2018.pgconfapac.org/cfp
Venue
To be Announced
Call for Papers
2017-10-10: Proposals acceptance begins
2017-12-04: Proposals acceptance ends
2017-12-13: Authors of accepted proposals contacted
If you need any additional information please contact our team at pgconfapac(at)googlegroups(dot)com.
This conference is organized by the PostgreSQL people from Asian communities. If you have any question, feel free to contact us on pgconfapac(at)googlegroups(dot)com.
For sponsorship related queries please get in touch with our team at apac-organizer(at)pgconf(dot)org.
Joshua D. Drake     October 10, 2017



We just finished the first PGConf South Africa and it was a fantastic success. When we first started thinking about the event, we were considering 30 people attending as a good turnout and there were nearly 60 people in attendance. To put that in perspective, the first PGDay New York event in 2012 had 55 people attend. I can honestly say that South Africa and even the whole continent of Africa was craving a PostgreSQL event.

There were some great technical talks on topics like  PL/pgSQL stored procedures, PL/Python stored procedures, replication, and security, but what was truly fascinating was the use cases. PostgreSQL is the key data store behind the MeerKAT telescope handling a massive amount of sensor data, is key to helping South African farmers to know where to plant their crop and is utilized extensively through the medical industry in South Africa. The coolest thing learning how PostgreSQL was used for quality control from a 3D printer. In this one, it was not how PostgreSQL was used, it was that the 3D printer was actually a high powered laser that would melt through titanium powder.

Thank you to the sponsors, Quant Solutions and OfferZen to help to make the event possible. And a special thank you to Kobus Wolvaardt who organized the event.


Jim Mlodgenski     October 04, 2017

Oh my goodness, Data Days!


When we rescheduled PGConf US Local: Seattle from August to November we did so due to attendee feedback. It was amazing - people didn't want to go to a conference on Saturday in August (I wonder why). I know, we should have known but it was a new model and we tried. We are extremely pleased with the results of the shift in schedule. The conference now takes place during "professional hours" on "professional days."

Image result for creative commons professional

Because of the shift and sponsor support we have added three new tracks, reopened the CFP, and created Data Days. The new tracks are: Big Data, AWS/Cloud, and Data Science. As these three Postgres content areas are Postgres independent we are also requesting that all communities within this realm submit to present. Let's turn PGConf US Local: Seattle into not only the best West Coast Postgres Conference but also the most highly integrated, heterogeneous data event in the Pacific Northwest.

CFP Dates:

  • Open until: 10/15/2017
  • Notification:  10/18/2017
  • CFP Link
Joshua D. Drake     September 19, 2017

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