We are pleased to announce that Early Bird tickets to Postgres Conference 2019 are now available. Whether you are seeking a world class big data and analytics learning opportunity from the Greenplum Summit, a deep dive from the Google Cloud Summit, Regulated Industry Information from the Regulated Industry track, or a dizzying amount of learning opportunities from over 100 breakout sessions, PostgresConf 2019 is the show not to miss! Oh, and did we mention there will be training options as well?

Register here:

https://postgresconf.org/conferences/2019

Call For Papers is still open! Submit your presentation at the above link.
 

Thanks for all of the support and we look forward to seeing you in March!

The Postgres Conference Organizer Team

 

At Postgres Conference we are always optimizing our People, Postgres, Data experience, and as more events move to Digital,  we have worked hard to perfect that collaborative experience for our community. The hard work of our volunteers has paid off, our content is top notch, and our participant account is consistently high.

 

With a now-proven track record, we are pleased to announce that we are accepting Community and Commercial presentations via the Postgres Webinar Series Call for Presentations through the end of 2020. If your presentation is accepted we will contact you directly to arrange an appropriate time to deliver your content.

Recent awesome news

KDE, arguably the most complete desktop experience for Linux, is now hosted on a private instance of Gitlab. As is proper, Gitlab only supports Postgres as the backend database.

For those who who love #FarmFresh or #farmtotable, there is a new website that showcases Farms that are delivering. It was developed using React, Rails, and Postgres. 

Upcoming Digital Events

• July 7, 10am PT: Deep Dive into PostgreSQL Indexing

A Deep Dive into PostgreSQL Indexing

• July 15, 10AM PT: Working with JSON Data in PostgreSQL vs. MongoDB

Working with JSON Data in PostgreSQL vs. MongoDB

Previous Digital Events:

• PostGIS Training series:
• Getting Started with PostGIS and OpenStreetMap by Ryan Lambert
• Advanced Operations and Features by Ryan Lambert
• Exploring OpenStreetMap from PostGIS:  Tools and Queries by Ryan Lambert
• Loading PostGIS with osm2pgsql by Ryan Lambert
• PostGIS Spatial Queries and Performance Tuning by Ryan Lambert
• PostgreSQL 12 and PostGIS 3.0 by Ryan Lambert
• Ops:
• FPGA: an Easier Path to Parallelism for Postgres? by Andrew Ellicott
• How to Deploy a SQL Database on Kubernetes by Chris Casano
• How to Move Data from Oracle to Postgres in Near-Real Time by Joshua Drake
• A Deep Dive into PostgreSQL Indexing by Ibrar Ahmed
• Mostly mistaken and ignored PostgreSQL parameters while optimizing a PostgreSQL database by Avinash Vallarapu
• Deeper Understanding of PostgreSQL Execution Plan: At plan time and run time by Jobin Augustine
• A Deep Dive into PostgreSQL Indexing by Ibrar Ahmed
• Enterprise Authentication and Connection Pooling by Erik Brandsberg
• Case Studies
• YugabyteDB: a distributed PostgreSQL database by Bryn Llewellyn
• Community vs. Enterprise Open Source – Which is Right for Your Business? by Justin Reock
• Postgres vs. MongoDB for real-time machine learning on wind turbine data by Luis Manuel Carril
• Turning PostgreSQL into a Cloud Native Data Service by Julian Fischer
• Scaling PostgreSQL: Never Shard Again and Gain Effortless Scale by Jim Walker
• Bring Compression to Postgres at Zero Cost of Performance by Tong Zhang

There were 20 attendees, including Melanie Plageman of Pivotal presenting/coordinating “Postgres Patch Review,” and Postgresql.org -Hacker Jeff Davis as hands on help. This was the first workshop of its kind for Silicon Valley Postgres and with the feedback received, we are planning to plan similar events at least twice a year to provide an opportunity that is currently not available elsewhere. (Sneak peek: there may be one at PostgresConf Silicon Valley on October 15th and 16th, which is right around the corner!)

Eight patches were reviewed, with three including specific feedback to the patch authors:

• Bhushan Uparkar on Index Skip Scan
• Mathias Brossard on psql command to show size of partition table
• Kaiting Chen on fixing quadratic performance of regexp match/split functions

We’re excited to be a part of this path of Postgres contributor building. Hopefully it will be a model for other meetups and community partners to follow in continuing to contribute to the Most Advanced Open Source Database ecosystem.

Silicon Valley Postgres is the fastest growing Postgres user group within North America. It was initiated just 12 months ago and will reach 700 members likely before Monday. The group exists to help all facets of Postgres users and the Postgres ecosystem, including, but not limited to, PostgreSQL, Greenplum, Aurora Postgres, AgensGraph, Yugabyte, ZomboDB, TimescaleDB.

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

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

To be Announced

2017-10-10: Proposals acceptance begins

2017-12-04: Proposals acceptance ends

2017-12-13: Authors of accepted proposals contacted

Congratulations

Henrietta Dombrovskaya, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion member for PostgresConf as well as Chicago Postgresql organizer nominated for Technologist of the Year!

 

Career Opportunity

A large, well known media company is seeking a Senior Level PostgreSQL Engineer and Architect. This is an on-site engagement, however the company is known to be lifestyle friendly with reasonable working hours, good pay, and benefits. Specific talents requested are the ability to mentor. The location is Seattle, WA. If you are interested in this position please contact randy@neuringerco.com with your resume.

Great content

• Doubling the Sorting Speed of Postgres Network Types with Abbreviated Keys

• Automatically updating Materialized Views

• OrderedAppend: An optimization for range partitioning

Extension Highlight

We wanted to highlight some of the fantastic work that is being done by the ecosystem with Postgres Extensions. Although the base of Postgres is the amazing and extensible PostgreSQL, a lot of users don’t realize that Postgres has the feature they are looking for, if only they were to look to the ecosystem.

Notable Extensions:

• pgaudit : The goal of pgAudit is to provide PostgreSQL users with the capability to produce audit logs often required to comply with government, financial, or ISO certifications.

• pg_credereum : pg_credereum is a PostgreSQL extension that provides a cryptographically verifiable audit capability for a PostgreSQL database, bringing some properties of blockchain to relational DBMS.

• H3-pg : PostgreSQL bindings for H3, a hierarchical hexagonal geospatial indexing system.

Postgres can do what?

There are a ton of Postgres compatible features out there. Some of them are overlooked core features and some of them require installing a different version of Postgres. Here are a few examples:

 

• TimescaleDB: Time series data management with Postgres

• YugabyteDB: Globally Distributed database with PostgreSQL compatibility

• Postgres-XL: Horizontally partitioned PostgreSQL

• Agensgraph: Graph capabilities with Postgres

• PG-Strom: GPU accelerated extension for Postgres 

 

Upcoming Education and Networking opportunities:

• PostgresConf Silicon Valley

• PostgresConf South Africa

 

Where is your path leading you?

 

At Postgres Conference Silicon Valley I promised during the launch that after the conference was completed PostgresWarrior and I would be taking a freedom tour to various National Parks. 

 

For us, our path is serving the community through education and professional and personal development. This happens in many forms including these newsletters.

 

Recent projects have been coordinating a successful webinar series from Yugabyte, creating  online live Postgres instructor lead training, and launching a new educational series on PostGIS. This is all happening while the Call for Papers for Postgres Conference 2020 now open! The ongoing goal is to allow any person to receive the education they need to be successful with People, Postgres, Data year around.

Training

The current training options from Postgres Conference can be found here:

https://postgresconf.org/conferences/Postgres-Digital-Training-Series/schedule/events

We have two performance trainings coming up in October:

• PostgreSQL Performance & Maintenance on October 29th
• Finding and Fixing Slow Queries on October 30th

 

Both of these training opportunities sell out at the physical conferences. They are solid content and at a reasonable price (149.00 USD ) it is hard to say no to a few hours for education in your day!

Software

Are you frustrated with the limitations and fragility of Logical Replication in PostgreSQL Core? There is a new software on the block called pgcat and it has an impressive list of features to allow your Logical Replication experience to be exceptional.

 

Looking for a simple script to help find tuning opportunities for PostgreSQL? The perl script postgresqltuner may just be what you are looking for. Yes, there really is an active developer community for the Perl language still.

 

A HyperLogLog data type for PostgreSQL from our friends at Citus. This Postgres module introduces a new data type hll which is a HyperLogLog data structure. HyperLogLog is a fixed-size, set-like structure used for distinct value counting with tunable precision. For example, in 1280 bytes hll can estimate the count of tens of billions of distinct values with only a few percent error.

 

Our partner Heimdall Data has been creating a new type of connection pool that removes a significant limitation within other software such as PgBouncer and PgPool. If you are looking for Enterprise Authentication (Active Directory/LDAP) as well as intelligent pooling for many users (and connections), it may be worth a look. There is a webinar next week on how it all works!

Does your path allow people to “Come as you are?”

In consideration of all of the great news from our community we can’t help but reflect on the blessings we have in the world of Open Source. Remember that Open Source is about exceptionalism, creativity, and most importantly freedom. When communities start restricting these three tenets of Open Source, they are no longer Open Source communities, even if their software is.

 

The theme for Postgres Conference 2020 in NYC is “come as you are” and we are asserting this mantra throughout our entire community. Over the past few years there has been an influx of toxicity throughout all circles and it is time for civility and grace to return. It is time to remember that we are all human. We all have angels and demons to our personalities. We are all flawed and we are all exceptional in our own way.

 

"But just because I don't agree with someone on everything doesn't mean that I'm not going to be friends with them. When I say, 'be kind to one another,' I don't only mean the people that think the same way that you do. I mean be kind to everyone."

 

-- Ellen DeGeneres

 

(Yes, this happened. No, it wasn’t planned.) 

Just outside of Moab Utah.

 

Find YOUR path.

Why did you attend PgConf US?

We have been looking for high quality, experienced, professional support for our application’s database for some time. We have found it difficult to find help online… seemingly every phone number we called was just an answering service. When we heard that the companies offering the level of service we were looking for were all available in the same place, we couldn’t resist.

Tell us a little bit (one or two paragraphs) about your project:

Our project (VX and VO collectively named Victor) is a SaaS solution for 911 emergency response systems. Victor provides analytics and quality assurance tools and services, enabling agencies to assess performance, measure resource & deployment activity, model demand, optimize workload, and even generate financial estimates. For more information see our website.

Why did you chose PostgreSQL for your project?

Victor requires both time and spacial awareness, along with all the other things that are expected from an RDBMS. PostgreSQL is stable, secure, mature, well documented, open source, actively developed, community supported, and generally bad ass. The choice was easy.

As I understand it, attending PgConf US was a last minute decision. Do you think it was worth it? If so, why?

Absolutely! Our objective was to meet with vendors who were able to provide high quality support and we were successful. Additionally, we met a ton of super geniuses (Paragon, TimescaleDB, I’m talking about you) and learned more then expected. For example, we had no idea we could put raster images in PostgreSQL and process them with PostGIS… amazing!

Would you attend PgConf US again?

Yes… see above. Unrelated, but unbelievably cool, we met a guy named Solar… a PhD (from MIT!) passionate about carbon nanotubes.

Are you interested in contributing to the community and if so, in what fashion?

Yes! …and here is our biggest piece of feedback.

It would be great if there was a clear point of entry for people like us… we have been using PostgreSQL for several years, have been through several upgrade cycles (we started on 9.0) and have no idea how our skills could be of use. We make SaaS applications, but make nothing in C. What else does the community need? How can we help?

We caught up with Alex Tatiyants after finding out about his Pev project. This is an awesome web based visual explain analyzer that is similar to the awesome explain.depesz . 

Tell us a little bit (one or two paragraphs) about your project or how you use Postgres: 

I created Pev (Postgres EXPLAIN Visualizer) to scratch my own itch. EXPLAIN generates a wealth of information, but isn’t easy to make sense of. I wanted to create a tool that helps me quickly diagnose problems with queries. Apparently, other people found it useful as well.

Why did you chose Postgres for your project? 

 

It is late August, 2019. This is the time where we are usually prepping for the very busy fall season and not much else. However, this is the Year of Postgres and everyone is driving 200MPH down the ecosystem highway (321.8688/KPH). We are going to kick off this newsletter with some exciting information about the community.

Events

PostgresConf has launched Digital Events! The goal of Digital Events is to open our education platform year round to all members of the community. Our first series of events will be held with our ecosystem partner YugabyteDB and their “Distributed SQL Webinar Series.” This is a series of free-to-attend Webinars exploring Distributed SQL from leaders in the field.

 

PostgreConf Silicon Valley tickets are going at a brisk pace and half day trainings are almost sold out. Register today to reserve your seat before prices go up on September 1st!

 

Right after Silicon Valley, PostgresConf South Africa is kicking off. This conference has grown by leaps and bounds over the last two years. We highly recommend attending for anyone who can!

 

PGConf.IN (India) has announced that their conference will be held in February 2020!

Meetups

We have seen the launch of three new meetups this month:

• Los Angeles Postgres The first meetup is planned for late October or early November as we continue to build the Silicon Beach community.
• Toronto Postgres Similar to Los Angeles, the first meetup is planned for late October or early November.
• Charm City Postgres This meetup was formed by long time community member Robert Treat.

 

Several other meetups are growing quickly: 

• Montreal Postgres has reached a respectable 358 members.
• Vancouver Postgres has reached over 400 members.
• Seattle Postgres has begun to grow again with a new schedule of events!

 

Interested in speaking or hosting a meetup? Contact us and we’ll connect you with the right people! 

Learn

Here is a short, great introduction tutorial on running PostgreSQL in Docker by Igal Sapir, Los Angeles Postgres organizer. Everybody has 13 minutes.

 

Shawn Wang from our friends at High Go has provided an insightful write-up on AES Performance.

Ecosystem

TimescaleDB is running a “State of Postgres” survey. Please take five minutes and help them out! They have also announced a new Distributed Timeseries product.

 

VMWare has just acquired Greenplum and PostgreSQL supporting company Pivotal.

Postgresql.org

PostgreSQL versions 11.5, 10.10, 9.6.15, 9.5.19, 9.4.24, and 12 Beta 3 are now out in the wild and addressing several important security concerns and bug fixes.

 

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Have news you’d like included in future newsletters? Contact us.