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?

• Friday, November 3, 2017: Half-day Trainings with Postgres experts
• Saturday, November 4, 2017: Breakout Sessions (lunch and coffee break provided)

We’ve had a great response to our PostgresConf US 2019 call for proposals with over 170 potential presentations -- thank you to everyone who has submitted so far! As with what has become a tradition among Postgres Conferences, we are extending our deadline by one week to allow those final opportunities to trickle in!


We accept all topics that relate to People, Postgres, Data including any Postgres related topic, such as open source technologies (Linux, Python, Ruby, Golang, PostGIS).

Talks especially in high demand are sessions related to Regulated Industries including healthtech, fintech, govtech, etc., especially use case and case studies.

Interested in attending this year’s conference?

We’ve expanded our offerings, with trainings and tutorials open to everyone who purchases a Platinum registration. No separate fees for Mondays trainings (but it will be first come, first serve for seating).

Don’t forget that Early Bird registration ends this Friday, January 18. Tickets are substantially discounted when purchased early.

March 18th and 19th will have immersive training. Instructors are encouraged to submit half and full day material for consideration. The preferred topics are centered around Postgres but anything People, Postgres, or Data related will be considered.

Monday, March 18th through Friday, March 22nd will host several partner summits, including popular and upcoming topics within the Postgres community and the annually hosted Regulated Industry Summit. Break out sessions will be held from Wednesday - Friday.

In addition to the partner summits, PostgresConf 2019 will offer multiple program tracks with Postgres related topics including (but not limited to): 

• Postgres Internals
• Postgres Administration
• Operations and Development
• Data
• Cloud
• Database Security and Compliance
• Use Cases
• Regulated Industries
• Telecommunications
• Healthcare and life sciences
• Railroad, airline and pipeline transportation
• Oil and gas
• Electric power and transmission
• Financial services and trading 

PostgresConf is a global nonprofit conference series with a focus on growing community through increased awareness and education of Postgres and related technologies. PostgresConf is known for its highly attended national conference with the mission of:

PgConf US 2017 has now completed. We had a record number of attendees, a record number of sponsors and a record number of talks. The conference rocked. It was only made possible by a team of highly talented and dedicated volunteers. Thank you to those volunteers.

With 2020 firmly in the rear view mirror, it is time to look forward and down the highway of 2021. The organizers of People, Postgres, Data have gathered over chat, email, phone, and even a few socially distant, in-person events to determine a strategy for continuing as the most influential and positive community for all things Postgres related.

Sad face

The goal is to resume in-person events. However, out of concern for the health and comfort of our global community, we have made the decision not to host any in-person events until Q4 of 2021. We are prepared to wait until 2022 if that is what the health officials recommend. We know that many will find this news disappointing and we are working diligently to ensure that the health and education of our community is the top priority.

Happy face

We are continuing our popular webinar series, adding new presenters with pertinent content for all of our attendees. We will be adding more professional development and data problem solving topics to our library, and we will no longer be limiting education to just Postgres, as many data and human problems are neutral in the particular platform we happen to enjoy. If there’s a topic you’d like to present or see, we’d love to hear from you!

RSVP for upcoming scheduled events

• January 26, 1pm ET: All we need to work with SQL is SQL
• January 27, 1pm ET: PostgreSQL Forks and Knives
• February 3, 2pm ET: Postgres for SQL Server Users
• February 4, 1pm ET: Configuring PostgreSQL for Faster Analytic Query Performance
• February 23, 1pm ET: Blockchain as a Database

Ecstasy 

Postgres Conference 2021: Digital will be happening in May of this year! An overwhelming feeling of great happiness and excitement has our dopamine pumping, and the whole People, Postgres, Data team is basking in it. 

 

As an all digital conference, we will offer a similar environment to what our community has come to expect: best in class content, professionalism, and top-tier educational opportunities for all who attend! Keep your eyes peeled over the next few weeks for more information on speaking opportunities and how to attend!

Pivotal Sponsor Highlight Blog for PostgresConf 2019

 

Written by:

Jacque Istok, Head of Data, Pivotal

 

1. Greenplum has its own community; what do you hope to achieve by joining the Postgres community and PostgresConf?

Both interest and adoption of Postgres have skyrocketed over the last two years, and we feel fortunate to be a part of the extended community. We have worked very hard to uplevel the base version of Postgres within Greenplum to more current levels and to be active in the Postgres community. We see Greenplum as a parallel (and analytic focused) implementation of Postgres, and we encourage the community to continue to embrace both the technology and the goal of the Greenplum project, which is Postgres at scale.

 

2. Are you planning to provide any new tech (PG features, etc.)?

This year we plan to announce several new things for both Greenplum and Postgres. We’re introducing new innovations in our cloud offerings in the marketplaces of AWS, Azure, and GCP. We also have major news about both our natural language at-scale analytics solution based on Apache Solr, and our multi-purpose machine learning and graph analytics library Apache MADlib. The next major release of Greenplum is a major focus as well, differentiating Greenplum from each of its competitors and bringing us ever closer to the latest versions of Postgres.

 

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

While it seems a little self-serving, I would like to take the opportunity to give props to the Pivotal Data Team. This team is a 300+ worldwide organization that helps our customers, our prospects, and the community to solve real world and really hard data problems—solved in part through Postgres technology. They all attack these use cases with passion and truly make a difference in the lives of the people that their solutions touch. I couldn’t wish to work with a finer group.

 

4. What is the number one benefit you see within Postgres that everyone should be aware of?

The number one benefit of Postgres is really its flexibility. This database chameleon can be used for SQL, NoSQL, Big Data, Microservices, time series data, and much more. In fact, our latest analytic solution, MADLib Flow, leverages Postgres as an operational engine. For example, Machine Learning models created in Greenplum can be pushed into a restful API as part of an agile continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline easily and efficiently—making Postgres the power behind what I still like to think of as #DataOps.

 

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

 

I deeply admire the passion and consistency of the community behind Postgres, constantly and incrementally improving this product over decades. And because Greenplum is based on Postgres, we get to interact with this vast community of talent. We are also able to more seamlessly interact with ecosystem products that already work with Postgres, making the adoption of Greenplum that much easier.

 

6. Tell us why you believe people should attend PostgresConf 2019 in March.

 

PostgresConf is going to be awesome, and I can’t wait for it to start! With Pivotal, Amazon, and EnterpriseDB headlining as Diamond sponsors, Greenplum Summit (along with multiple other summits), and high-quality speakers and content across the board, this year’s PostgresConf promises to be bigger and better than ever and surely won’t disappoint.

 

We’re thrilled to be back to present the second annual Greenplum Summit on March 19th at PostgresConf. Our theme this year is “Scale Matters”, and what we’ve seen with our customers is that every year it matters more and more. Our users are part of organizations that are generating tons of data and their need to easily and quickly ingest and interrogate all of it is paramount. This is true even more now than ever before as the insights that can be found not only help differentiate them from their competitors, but are also used to build better products and increase customer loyalty.

 

The day will be filled with real-world case studies from Greenplum users including Morgan Stanley, the European Space Astronomy Centre, Insurance Australia Group, Purdue University, Baker Hughes (a GE company), Conversant, and others, plus presentations and deep-dive tech sessions for novices and experts alike.

People and Postgres: April 17th, 2019 Welcome to the first of what we hope will be a thriving and productive way to interact with the People, Postgres, Data community!

The goal of this newsletter is to let our community know the ins-and-outs of what is happening in the world of Postgres and the Postgres ecosystem. Let's start from the top:  Ecosystem news JD, Co-Chair of PostgresConf, was recently part of the Inside Analysis podcast: The Evolving Enterprise. This podcast is not only available on the Internet but was live on 20 radio markets.  Crunchy Data Collaborates With Center for Internet Security® To Continue Advancing PostgreSQL Security For Enterprise The Distributed SQL Summit is being held at PostgresConf Silicon Valley on September 20th, 2019. This unique "event within an event" strategy was spearheaded by PostgresConf with the Regulated Industry summit years ago and it continues to grow with events such as the AWS Migration Day and the Pivotal Greenplum Summit. The Distributed SQL Summit is a vendor neutral single day event specializing in providing high quality Developer, Architect and other Practitioner content on deploying and developing production quality products and services over Distributed SQL. It is sponsored by: Events PostgresConf Beijing CFP is open PostgresConf Silicon Valley CFP is open PGIBZ is being held at the end of June in Spain! Notable commits for Postgres 12 GSSAPI Encryption support Foreign Key support for partitioned tables Progress reporting for CREATE INDEX Generated Columns REINDEX CONCURRENTLY Upcoming People, Postgres, Data meetups NYC, April 24th: JSONB and When not to use JSONB  Salt Lake City, April 25th: Automated real time reporting of PG query logs Philly, April 25th, Awesome Automated APIs and Automagic REST Vancouver B.C., April 30: Monitoring and Managing Autovacuum  Subscribe to our community! (Announcements and Newsletters only)

Join the fantastic and growing Postgres community in Cape Town, South Africa for a single day event on October 3rd, 2017! The event is being hosted by fellow Postgres advocates who travel from South Africa each year to attend our National Event in order to increase their knowledge of Postgres and be a part of the community. This year they are joining us and making a commitment to build out our International community and conferences!

• The CFP is open is open from now until August 25th. We will notify speakers by September 1st! Talks are subject to our presentation guidelines.

Local events are designed to bring comprehensive educational content and networking opportunities to the "local" Postgres community where the event is being held. They are perfect opportunities to show support for Postgres, find leads, and build relationships with other professionals and companies using and supporting Postgres.

Why did you attend PgConf US?

Our company is exploring the use of PostgreSQL as an additional DBMS choice to support Vertex Enterprise, our tax technology platform. Attending the conference offered me an opportunity to immerse myself into a variety of topics around PostgreSQL, as well as the chance to interact with other users to tap into their experiences.


Tell us a little bit about your project or how you use PostgreSQL:

Vertex Enterprise is a global tax management end-to-end solution that integrates all tax processes with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI) systems on a single platform using a tax performance engine.   The solution is a blend of technologies that surround a Java based processing and calculation engine. This includes rich UI's, import, export, business intelligence / reporting, and big data integration. The foundation of our database leverages a multi-dimensional database structure, as well as other structures whose design varies based upon the needs of a particular function so that we can optimize performance. (ie. import/export/reporting).

The official brochure provides a high level overview of the capabilities and interfaces that our DBMS must support.  

Why did you chose PostgreSQL for your project?

PostgreSQL checks many of the boxes that we are looking for in our consideration of an additional DBMS option.


Some of these include:

* Performance
* Lower cost
* Multi-tenancy support 
* Suitable for deployment on premise, in a hosted environment, and in the cloud
* Industry acceptance
* Ease of administration on locally administered instances
* Features characteristic of an enterprise strength database (auditing, partitioning, replication, procedural language support)


This was your first PGConf US, was it a last minute decision? Do you think it was worth it? If so, why?

The conference was on our radar since the beginning of the year, and it exceeded expectations. Listening to and interacting with actual contributors to the product is not something you have the opportunity to do at many conferences. The sessions covered a variety of topics around PostgreSQL that were of interest (performance, tuning, feature discussion, lessons learned, cloud deployment options, optimization, etc).


Would you attend PgConf US again?

Yes, definitely. 


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

My "day job" keeps me pretty busy, but as far as sharing our experience with PostgreSQL, I am willing to contribute in that way :) .