Joshua D. Drake Blog Posts

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?

That's right, folks; the time has come. 

• Mastering PostgreSQL Administration

• Securing Data in a Multi-Platform Data Lake

• Personal Time Management

• Contributing to PostgreSQL

2ndQuadrant Sponsor Highlight Blog for PostgresConf 2019

 As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2019, learn more about about featured Platinum Sponsor 2ndQuadrant, including their commitment to partnering with and contributing to the Postgres community.

 

Tell us about the recent uptick in Oracle to Postgres migrations.

Licensing costs of Oracle is a significant factor for businesses looking to migrate towards PostgreSQL. Not only is PostgreSQL a more cost effective solution, but it provides enterprise-level capabilities and customization options. The increasing demand for migration services from Oracle to PostgreSQL can also be attributed to the availability of PostgreSQL in the cloud.

 

Where do you see the Postgres market going?

PostgreSQL has been gaining traction with every release; interest and usage by large enterprises worldwide is growing exponentially due to the robust capabilities it provides. 2ndQuadrant intends to continue their active contributions in development and supports the overall growth of PostgreSQL.

 

 Do you have any big wins this year?

2Q PGConf 2018 had a successful second year bringing together PostgreSQL developers and users. Both speakers and attendees enjoyed the combination of technical and use case topics as well as the diverse range of networking opportunities. 

Sri Rangarajan, Lead Software Engineer at Enova International, commented saying he appreciates 2ndQuadrant’s hard work in “promoting and fostering a savvy, healthy and helpful community to welcome newcomers just like [it] did for [him] 5 years ago!”

For the second year in a row, PostgreSQL has been named DBMS of the Year by DB-Engines. This shows that developers and users alike are acknowledging the robust and versatile capabilities that it has to offer.

 

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

PostgreSQL's advanced features cater to a broad range of use cases all within the same DBMS. Rather than going for edge case solutions, developers are relying on the absolute reliability of the hyperconverged database to simplify their production deployments.

 

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

The Postgres community is one of the easiest global communities to work with. There is an open mindset all around and a common goal of growing the Postgres ecosystem as a whole. 

 

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

Conferences are a great way for people in the PostgreSQL community to come together and share knowledge and ideas, which is the true spirit of open source. It is very exciting to see into the future developments of the project from the people who contribute so much to its growth.

It is a great way for members of the community to come together in person to share knowledge in different areas of the technology, describe practical use cases, and give sneak previews into cutting edge technologies for future versions of PostgreSQL.

 

About 2ndQuadrant:

2ndQuadrant provides PostgreSQL Solutions for the Enterprise - reliably deploying them on the platform of your choice and providing 24/7 Production Support. Our solutions address all aspects of your database ecosystem, ensuring high availability, disaster recovery, backup & failover management, and much more. 

Moreover, we provide tools to make your deployment process simple and reliable. With over 100 years of combined code contributions to the PostgreSQL project, our engineers ensure that your PostgreSQL solutions are fully supported in your production environment.

Visit the 2ndQuadrant team in the Exhibit Hall in the Metropolitan Ballroom on Wednesday, March 20, and Thursday, March 21.  

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2019, and buy your tickets soon!

• Amazon
• Pivotal
• 2ndQuadrant
• Microsoft
• Timescale
• HighGo
• Data Dog
• Fivetran
• BlueTalon
• Goldman Sachs
• forhims
• Immuta

Community,

Oh my goodness, Data Days!

CFP Dates:

• Open until: 10/15/2017
• Notification:  10/18/2017
• CFP Link

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? 

• Friday, September 29, 2017: Trainings

Mastering Postgres Administration: Bruce Momjian

Postgres Performance and Maintenance: Joshua D. Drake 

• Saturday, September 30, 2017: Breakout Sessions (To be announced)

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

Jacque Istok, is the Head of Data for Pivotal, one of our Diamond Sponsors for PostgresConf US 2018. Pivotal is hosting the first annual Greenplum Summit at PostgresConf US 2018, with lots of great Greenplum and Postgres-related content. Read what Jacque has to say bout Greenplum and Postgres, as well as why to attend the Greenplum Summit: 

Greenplum is an Open Source variant of Postgres; what benefits do you bring to the table over vanilla Postgres?

Postgres is a powerful ORDBMS, but as your data scales, the only way to keep up is to buy bigger and bigger machines to run on. It suffers from the same problems that all SMP databases do: you can only get as big as the machine you’re running on.

With Greenplum you can put a subset of your data on a Postgres database on one reasonably-sized machine, and another subset on a second machine, and so on. All of your users and applications can then query one of these Postgres databases as if all the data was in a single location - making your data scale limitless. Greenplum manages the distribution, data shuffling, and querying of all of your data across a magically sharded implementation of Postgres databases.

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

The Postgres community represents some of the most passionate and knowledgeable creators, developers, and users of database technology of our time. We believe that the combination of Postgres and Greenplum becomes the software equivalent of what Oracle Exadata purported to be: an all-purpose database that can do both transactional and analytical workloads across multi-structured data. Simply put, the Greenplum community is looking to join with the Postgres community to further the understanding and adoption of these technologies.

Do you have plans for cross pollination of technologies with the two open source projects?

Greenplum forked from Postgres over 10 years, circa Postgres 8.2. Greenplum 5.0 is based off of Postgres 8.3, with our next major release slated for Postgres 9.4 (current open source Greenplum is compatible with 9.0 as of this writing).

Likewise, we have Postgres committers working at Pivotal looking for opportunities to improve the Postgres code specifically for analytics. We are also ensuring that other projects related to Greenplum, like Apache MADLib, continue to be compatible with Postgres.

What challenges do you see working with the Postgres community as an open source fork?

The Postgres community is a long-running and very passionate group, and we want to be both collaborative and respectful in how we continue to grow our participation. We see the products as having synergies which complement each other very well, with some use cases that best fit Postgres, and others that best fit Greenplum. The use of either benefits the other as they both further adoption.

What would you tell a user who has a choice between Postgres and Greenplum about when they should use which system?

Postgres is a great ORDBMS that will scale to the performance of a single server. For analytical needs, being restricted to a small number of terabytes does not allow for the type of exploration that most organizations need. Because Greenplum is a Postgres compatible database, you can start out using Postgres and either convert to Greenplum underneath or leverage Greenplum alongside your Postgres systems (making data ETL a ton easier). This then makes the choice of which product to use for your particular use case clearer and clearer.

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

The number one barrier we will have to contributing is not seeing the corresponding adoption of our technologies. We feel very strongly that both the transparency and removal of vendor lock-in make our open source commitment the only choice for users. I’m here to implore the community to embrace our technology with zeal and help us continue to drive more and more Postgres adoption in the world.

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

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.

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

PostgresConf is going to be awesome - with both Pivotal and Amazon headlining as Diamond sponsors - as well as the quality of speakers and their content. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.

We’re thrilled to organize the first annual Greenplum Summit at PostgresConf. Greenplum co-founder, Scott Yara, will give a keynote on April 18th relating to how data tells the story at the organizations that we help enable (#DataTellsTheStory), and his journey from SMP to MPP. Greenplum Summit on April 19th will be a full day packed with with great use case sessions and tech talks for novices and experts alike.

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