Debra Cerda Blog Posts

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2018, learn more about about featured Platinum Sponsor 2ndQuadrant, including their commitment to partnering with and contributing to the Postgres community, from Simon Riggs, Chief Technology Officer, of 2ndQuadrant and PostgreSQL Major Developer/Committer:

Tell us about your commitment to the PostgreSQL Community.

The 2ndQuadrant vision is to be the bridge between the database needs of enterprise users and open source contributions to PostgreSQL. We have pursued a joint strategy of providing both working code (available now) and later submitting the features into core PostgreSQL. Over the past 15+ years, our team has widely contributed to the growth and development of the PostgreSQL project; partnering with customers to identify bottlenecks and then contribute towards enterprise features that address them in PostgreSQL, benefiting everyone that uses it. Besides contributing code, all members of the 2ndQuadrant team are very active in the community on an individual and local level, often helping to organize PUG events, conferences, and meetups.

Are there any rising stars in the community you’d like to give props to? 

Marco Nenciarini - located in Prato, Italy - has been a long time supporter and contributor of PostgreSQL. He is an active maintainer of PGDG’s APT repository, maintaining builds and binaries for PostgreSQL and associated tools & extensions, while contributing towards process improvement for sane builds. Marco is the lead developer for Barman, a backup manager and disaster recovery tool for enterprises with high business continuity requirements.  He is the current president of IT.PUG in Italy and a part of the organizing committee for PGDay.IT.

What features would you like to see in v11 and v12?

As PostgreSQL matures, so do the features that come with each release. In the next two release we’re most looking forward to improved Partitioning performance, the implementation of the MERGE SQL command, and procedures that allow server-side transactions.

Are there any features in development from 2ndQuadrant that the community should be looking forward to?

2ndQuadrant is working hard on the development of Bi-Directional Replication (BDR3), containing new architectural features and a wide and deep set of features.

In addition, we continuously work on features for scalability, performance, security and robustness.

What is the number one barrier you see to contributing to the Postgres community?

The Postgres community is one of the easiest communities to become a part of. With an open mindset all around and a common goal of growing open source PostgreSQL, the community is very accepting to anyone looking to learn, contribute, and better the Postgres ecosystem as a whole. Between the helpful tools on postgresql.org and the growing community, comprised of seasoned veterans and fresh faces, there is always helpful information to guide you.

What is the best thing about working with the Postgres community?

PostgreSQL is the most popular database when it comes to new adoption. Even existing users of other databases are flocking towards PostgreSQL - and it’s not just to save money. PostgreSQL has been growing year on year and we’re attracting interest from the largest enterprises, as it is fully capable of securely supporting enterprise database systems. 

There is still competition out there, especially with the current fad of developer-focused NoSQL databases. But the community is big enough and strong enough to quickly adapt to changing times and push forwards. The members of the PostgreSQL community are passionate about their work and the growth of the project.

Tell us why you believe people should attend PostgresConf 2018 in April.

Community conferences expand your knowledge in different areas of the technology, describe practical use cases as well as give sneak previews into cutting edge technologies for future versions of PostgreSQL. 

Simon along with Tom Kincaid, General Manager of 2ndQuadrant, presents "Internet of Things with PostgreSQL - Performance & Security" on Friday, April 20, at 8:50 am. Tom also presents "Postgres -- Past, Present and Future" and will discuss the challenges that may be faced by Postgres in the next 5 years on Thursday, April 19, at 3:20 pm. 

Visit the 2ndQuadrant team in the Exhibit Hall in the Newport Grand Ballroom on Wednesday, April 18, and Thursday, April 19.  

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2018, and buy your tickets soon!

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2018, learn more about the engaging content and our speakers for this year in our Speaker Spotlight Series.

Tom Limoncelli is the SRE Manager at StackOverflow.com and author of Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly). He is co-author of The Practice of System and Network Administration (3rd edition just released) and The Practice of Cloud System Administration.  

Tom will be presenting a half-day training on Monday, April 16 on "Personal Time Management: The Basics for Overloaded People." Read what he has to say about Postgres and why to attend his session:

Why PostgreSQL? What got you into it, and made you stick with it?

The startup I was at in 2003 needed a database. Since we did a lot of work with IP and network addresses, we picked PostgreSQL because it supports those as native types.

Tell us about your involvement with the greater Postgres community. 

I'm new to the greater Postgres community. I've been a system administrator since 1988 and often speak on related topics.

What features should be developed/improved and released in the next major upgrade?

Anything that makes replication and failovers easier and more reliable. 

Why should attendees come to your talk at PostgresConf US 2018? What would you like for them to take away from your session?

Time management: you will gain an additional day out of every week. Radical ideas: you'll learn how modern software ("distributed computing") is radically changing how we build systems and do operations. I'd like to give them hope for the future.

What is your favorite aspect of PostgresConf US?

That it's in my back yard!  I live 10 miles from here!

What advice would you have for a Computer Science graduate or entry level developer who are interested in learning and engaging with Postgres?

Give yourself projects. Try to break things and then see if you can repair them.  You'll learn more from recovering a failed system than anything else.

Bonus Question: You can invite any three living people from anywhere in the world to dinner. Who do you invite and why?

Obama (because I'd like to thank him), Steve Martin (because he has an amazing life story and is super smart), and Jennifer Lawrence (she also has an interesting life story).  I also think that these three people would get along well.

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2018, and buy your tickets soon!

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2018, learn more about the engaging content and our speakers for this year in our Speaker Spotlight Series.

Elizabeth Zalman is the Co-founder & CEO of strongDM, the definitive data security product. Previously she was Co-Founder and CEO of the cross-device profile company Media Armor.

Liz will be presenting a breakout session "Do You Know Your Vendor Dependencies" on Wednesday, April 18, at 4 pm. Read what she has to say about Postgres and why to attend her session: 

Why PostgreSQL? What got you into it, and made you stick with it?

Featureful performance & proven reliability. Over the years I've found fewer and fewer reasons to consider alternatives beyond Postgres (two notable exceptions being redis-style KV and queues).

Tell us about your involvement with the greater Postgres community.

strongDM hears a lot about how its customers use PG and its derivatives (Greenplum, the latest on Aurora, etc.) and we love sharing tips when appropriate.

What new features of PostgreSQL 10 are you most excited about?

As a security product, we're always happy to see security-related upgrades: SASL/SCRAM authentication is a popular option in several of database systems, and is a significant upgrade over the previous salted hashes. We also rely heavily on partitioning, so all related enhancements are welcome.Finally: although we generally wouldn't choose to run parallel queries in a primarily OLTP system, the promise of running analytic queries on a replica (rather than ETL'ing into an analytic database) is very appealing.

What features should be developed/improved and released in the next major upgrade?

Dynamic optimization for queries on partitioned tables. Right now if you run select * from date_partitioned_table where event_timestamp between NOW() and NOW() - interval '7 days'; It scans every partition because the result of NOW() is not knowable ahead of time. But it could optimize that query when it was asked to execute it. Instead of creating a static query plan it could say, I know I'm going to have to compute a list of partitions. So, let's just remember that. Then right before the query runs, it could calculate the list and run the query as though it had been planned with a static date range, and thus only query the affected tables. 

 Why should attendees come to your talk at PostgresConf US 2018?

In this talk, I'll share practical examples of breaches I've personally experienced along with advice on how to hold your vendors accountable, and hopefully make the topic of security a little less intimidating in the process.

What sessions are you most excited about attending at PostgresConf US 2018?

I am looking forward to attending “Reducing the Surface Area of Risk in Data Security” by Tim Gorman and “General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with Azure Database for PostgreSQL” by Mark Bolz.

What is your favorite aspect of PostgresConf US?

Being able to network with and learn from a unique community! I’ve found practice to really be one of the best ways to learn about databases.

 What advice would you have for a Computer Science graduate or entry level developer who are interested in learning and engaging with Postgres? 

 I’ve found practice to really be one of the best ways to learn about databases. Get your hands dirty: try breaking things and then fixing them! 

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2018, and buy your tickets soon!

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2018, learn more about the engaging content and our speakers for this year in our Speaker Spotlight Series.

Hubert Zhang will co-present with Jack Wu at PostgresConf US 2018 on "Customize and Secure the Runtime and Dependencies of Your Procedural Languages using PL/Container." Hubert is a staff software engineer at Pivotal. He received his Master Degree at Peking University, with a major in artificial intelligence. He is most interested in database systems and distributed computing platform.

Tell us about your involvement with the greater Postgres community. (How long have you been involved? How have you contributed? How else would you want to contribute?)

I've been working on Postgres based MPP database Greenplum and HAWQ since 2014. I contributed on PLContainer in Greenplum, data locality, and Ranger module of HAWQ (a SQL-On-Hadoop system).

What features should be developed/improved and released in the next major upgrade?

Vectorize execution for OLAP queries.

Who should attend your talk at PostgresConf US 2018? What would you like for them to take away from your session?

Data scientists and anyone who want to use Python and R in database to do data analysis and machine learning. You'll learn how to use PLContainer as well as how to build a customized docker image to setup your specialized Python or R environment.

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2018, and buy your tickets soon!

The month of January is just about over and we are coming up on the end of our Early Bird registration window for PostgresConf US 2018, which takes place in Jersey City, New Jersey from April 16th to April 20st at The Westin Jersey City Newport.

You have until tomorrow to purchase your tickets for $200 off for the largest PostgreSQL conference in the world. Early Bird tickets are on sale here through January 31.

We are excited to announce that we received over 170 proposals for PostgresConf US 2018, with an impressive range of high quality content and speakers. On April 16th and 17th, we are pleased to offer a choice of 15 different training sessions so you are sure to have the chance to dig deep into a topic that interests you. Some of our training classes are:

• Mastering PostgreSQL Administration
• Tutorial on Modern PostgreSQL High Availability
• Deep Dive into PostgreSQL Authentication Methods
• Digging into Advanced SQL
• The postgresql.conf from A-Z: Includes Postgres Performance and Maintenance

For a complete list, check out the events page for all of our training classes. 

Also during PostgresConf, you will also have an opportunity to meet our great sponsors, including:

• Diamond: Amazon Web Services, Pivotal
• Platinum: Compose, OpenSCG, 2ndQuadrant, Microsoft
• Gold: Cybertec, JetBrains, Citus Data, EnterpriseDB, Linode, Timescale, Cockroach Labs

At the Westin Jersey City Newport, we have negotiated a discounted conference room rate of $260/night + applicable taxes for attendees. Be sure to book prior to March 26, 2018 - the conference rate is not guaranteed after this date. Rooms may be booked via our dedicated Westin booking page, or via telephone (888) 627-7148. If booking via telephone please mention "PostgresConf US 2018" to receive the group rate.

For more information, please visit the PostgresConf US 2018 website. 

Stay tuned for our presentation and breakout sessions announcement. We look forward to seeing you in April!

P.S. Looking for a discount code? Check your local Postgres User Group mailing list.