Debra Cerda Blog Posts

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 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.

Abbas Butt is a Software Architect at EnterpriseDB, and he will present a half-day training "Deep dive into PostgreSQL Authentication Methods" on Monday, April 16, at 1 pm. Learn more about Abbas and his involvement in the Postgres community:

Why PostgreSQL?

My company's business revolves around PostgreSQL.

Tell us about your involvement with the greater Postgres community.

I have been involved with PostgreSQL for about 10 years. Over the years I have contributed by reporting bugs and developing various FDWs. I have also worked to make PostgreSQL an XA complaint database by using a modified version of pgBouncer. My next plans are to come up with small programming exercises with solutions to accompany this book http://www.interdb.jp/pg/ ("The Internals of PostgreSQL for database administrators and system developers"  by Hironobu Suzuki). This will give the readers hands on experience.

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

Declarative table partitioning & query parallelism

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

Write Scalability and High Availability

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

Attendees should come to have great time learning about PostgreSQL authentication methods. After attending the session the attendees will be better placed to decide which authentication scheme should they use and why.

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

"Aurora PostgreSQL Tutorial and Extended Deep Dive" and "Know your meme: Develop a webapp using Google Cloud Kubernetes and Cloud SQL"

What is your favorite aspect of PostgresConf US?

Being able to listen and exchange point of views with other community members.

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

Read this book : "The Internals of PostgreSQL for database administrators and system developers"  by Hironobu Suzuki.

 

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

 

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2019, learn more about the engaging content and our speakers for this year in our Speaker Spotlight Series.

 

Henrietta "Hettie" Dombrovskaya is a database researcher and developer with over 30 years of academic and industrial experience. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Saint Petersburg, Russia, where she taugh Database and Transaction Theory, as well as multiple database tuning classes for both beginners and advanced professionals.

 

Her professional experience includes consulting for a number of government projects, and providing Data services in the financial sector, manufacturing, and distribution. She is a co-author, with B. Novikov, of the book “System Tuning." As Associate Director of DB at Braviant Holdings, she is happy to have an opportunity to implement the results of her research in practice.

 

Hettie will be presenting a breakout session on Wednesday, March 20, on "Using FDW Like Never Before." Read what she has to say about Postgres and why to attend her session:

 

Why Postgres? Tell us about your involvement with the greater Postgres community.

I started to use Postgres by pure accident. I used to be a hard-core Oracle person, with 20 years of Oracle experience, and then I was offered a job at a company that was using Postgres. The year was 2010. I hadn't use Postgres since my student years and Stonebraker's version, so I reluctantly agreed -- thinking that it would be a very temporal job. But after a couple of months I found myself completely enchanted with Postgres, and decided to stay -- with Postgres as well as with the company.

 

 

For the past  several years I've being more active in promoting Postgres in different communities. My goal is to show the variety of ways Postgres can be used virtually anywhere, to promote Postgres among industries, developers and in academia. Since Dec 2016 I have led a Chicago PostgreSQL User Group, and I always make sure I have interesting speakers every month. Also, I am actively participating in the development and promotion of bitemporal framework in Postgres.

 

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

 

I hope that bitemporal framework will be eventually implemented as a real extension. 

 

Why should attendees come to your talk at PostgresConf US 2019? What would you like for them to take away from your session?

 

I have two sessions at this conference. The first one, "Using FDW Like Never Before" is literally about "where there is a will, there is a way"! I am just showing a cool technique everyone can use, and hope somebody will build a Postgres feature on this idea.

 

The subject of the second session, ""Connecting Galaxies: Information Exchange Techniques for Java/PostgreSQL Applications" -- which I am co-presenting with Alyssa Ritchie -- is something I have been working on throughout my entire professional life. Most of the time when database people talk about optimization, they mean the SQL queries optimization. When we are talking about the real-life application -- not the abstract query -- the most performance gains can be achieved when optimizing the way an application interacts with a database.

 

This is one of the topics which "does not belong", and neither DB people, nor the application people want to claim it. So, once again, I am trying to profess and spread the word.

 

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

 

Revisit your freshman year math, calculus and algebra. You can't write good SQL without it.

 

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2019, 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.

Jignesh Shah is Product Manager for Amazon RDS with Amazon Web Services. At AWS he works on PostgreSQL engines at AWS including Amazon RDS PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility. He has worked with PostgreSQL since 2005 and has released application and database lifecycle products using PostgreSQL at appOrbit and VMware.

Jignesh will be co-presenting the full day "Amazon Relational Database Service for PostgreSQL and AWS Database Migration Service Training" on April 17 at 9 am, as well as the "Deep Dive into the RDS PostgreSQL Universe" session on Friday, April 20 at 9:50 am. 

Read what he has to say about Postgres and why to attend his session:

 

Why PostgreSQL?

Features, Open Source, License!

Tell us about your involvement with the greater Postgres community.

Involved since 2004ish. Early part focussed more on performance on high end servers. (Performance bottlenecks, working to resolve them in standard PostgreSQL) Lately more as an advocate.

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

Pub/Sub Logical Replication

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

CALL Procedure (multi-transaction), SQL Packages

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

Learn about the features in Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and how best to leverage them!

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

Keynotes!, Tutorials (Aurora, DMS), Customer sessions!

What is your favorite aspect of PostgresConf US?

Meeting the user community of PostgreSQL

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

Start with the use cases. Learn how PostgreSQL supports these use cases. Dive deeper on why PostgreSQL solves them in that particular way!

 

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.

Malcolm McLean of Apace Systems is a PostgreSQL DBA, Linux admin, Java/PHP developer and according to his bio "a bit of a pedantic perfectionist", with over 12 years of experience with PostgreSQL and somewhat more than that with Linux and development.

Malcolm is presenting "PostgreSQL in a Geographically Distributed Realtime Transactional System" on Thursday, April 19, at 11:20 am. Read what he has to say about Postgres and why to attend his session: 

Why PostgreSQL?

My very first job over 13 years ago introduced me to Postgres after having only worked with MySQL at university. Since then, I've been happier with its performance compared to other DB's I've benchmarked as well as with the features that are continuously introduced to keep the database on the forefront. Across 3 companies I have never looked back and never regretted my decision to always use Postgres.

Tell us about your involvement with the greater Postgres community.

I spoke at the first PgConf South Africa last year and I'm now one of the organisers of PostgresConf South Africa 2018.

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

Definitely the integrated logical replication without the need of an extension.

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

It perhaps won't make Postgres 11, but at least by Postgres 12 we should have BDR integrated with the current logical replication capabilities rounded off.

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

We had an interesting replication problem to solve. Multi-master replication where data needed to be replicated betweens servers in multiple countries, some with data restrictions, but without replicating data where it didn't need to go. So a sort of conditional sharding with redundancy in each data center.

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

 The talks on replication (anything to make our lives easier) and security. 

What is your favorite aspect of PostgresConf US?

Meeting like-minded people from different backgrounds. And of course, the trip itself. I've done quite a bit of travelling over the years, but I haven't yet been to the US.

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

Push yourself to learn. Sitting back doesn't get you very far. 

 

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

 

In support of our theme of "People, Postgres, Data", the Postgres Conference 2019 hosts its 3rd Annual Talent Exchange & Career Fair on Friday, March 22, from 11am - 2pm, in the Metropolitan Ballroom at the Sheraton New York Times Square. Featuring hiring managers and recruiters from several of our Postgres Conference sponsor companies, this event is free for job seekers and open to the public.

Companies represented include:

• 2nd Quadrant
• Amazon
• Credativ
• Cybertec
• DataDog
• DBeaver
• Google
• HighGo
• Microsoft
• Percona
• Pivotal
• TimeScaleDB (440 Labs)

With PostgreSQL winning the title of DBMS of the Year for the second year in a row from DB-Engines, talent with PostgreSQL related skills is in high demand. The Career Fair brings together employers and candidates in one of the hottest career options available today -- Postgres developers and DBAs -- as well as Solution Engineers, Customer Success Managers, Developer Advocates, Global Migration Practice Consultant, and many more!

We will also have Postgres professionals of varied backgrounds volunteering as career mentors from 11 am - 1:30 pm. Be sure to bring copies of your resume to share with employers and for feedback from our mentors.

New for this year -- Stop by the Postgres Conference 2019 Photo Booth on Friday between 11 am – 1pm for a free professional headshot! A professional image can often be a first impression for a hiring manager or recruiter and help you stand out amongst other job applicants.

Looking to increase your Postgres related knowledge and skills? Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2019, and buy your tickets soon!