Seattle Postgres and People, Postgres, Data were present at the 20th Anniversary Event of LinuxFest Northwest this weekend! The “Fest” is a conference built around Free and Open Source Software, taking place in Bellingham, Washington. It is a true gathering of over 2000 Open Source practitioners. There was also a well attended Postgres Track and an “Ask the experts” panel.

Highlighted Find

Also at LinuxFest Northwest was YottaDB. YottaDB uses the PostgreSQL wire protocol to allow universal driver access to their in-memory transactional database. This has become a popular way to utilize the maturity of the PostgreSQL code base and reduce overhead in having to maintain a protocol and drivers.

Ecosystem Content

• What is high cardinality, and how do time-series databases like InfluxDB and TimescaleDB compare?

• 11 Things to Know about Databases and Postgres in Containers

• PostgreSQL security: a quick look at authentication best practices [Tutorial]

• Distributed PostgreSQL on a Google Spanner Like Architecture - Storage Layer

Requesting Feedback

We are looking for good dates to host PostgresConf Philly in July/August 2019 and we are actively reviewing new markets for other Postgres Conference events including Texas, Vancouver B.C., and Seattle. If you have feedback on opportunities in these areaa including dates, venues, or a desire to join the amazing People, Postgres, Data team, let us know at organizers@postgresconf.org.

 

Noteworthy Commits & Releases

The PostgreSQL git repo was largely bug fixes and updates the past couple of weeks but we have some great releases including migration tools and Distributed SQL:

 

• Outflux (Outflux -> TimescaleDB migration tool)

• Yugabyte v1.2.4 (Apr 02, 2019), Distributed SQL

• Postgres Checkup 1.0, Automate checking on Postgres health

• PgCLI v2.1.0, A feature-full command line client for Postgres

Join our community

• News and Announcements

Upcoming Events

• Postgres Ibiza

• PostgresConf Beijing

• PostgresConf Silicon Valley

• Silicon Valley Postgres Meetup

People, Postgres, Data and The World’s Database

 

The World’s Database celebrates all of Postgres, including whichever version, fork, or hybrid used to build yourself, your business, or your hobby. We have Open and Closed Source technologies. We have amazing extensions (TimescaleDB), unique implementations (Yugabyte), and respected forks to solve specific problems such as Greenplum, Azure, and Aurora. We have meetups where professionals can gather to collaborate and network in all major U.S. markets. Most importantly we are an inclusive community celebrating everything surrounding the maturity, extensibility, and growth of the Postgres ecosystem.

PGConf US in partnership with SeaPug is pleased to announce that the call for papers for PostgreSQL Conference US Local: Seattle is now open. 

National Diamond Sponsor

The call for papers will be open from May 16, 2017 until July 2, 2017. Speakers will be notified of acceptance/decline no later than July 8.

The two track, two day conference is a perfect opportunity for the Vancouver, B.C., west coast, and Rocky Mountain regions to join the PostgreSQL community and increase their knowledge.

National Platinum Sponsor

Breakdown of the Conference Layout: 

• August 11th: Training
• August 12th: Breakout Sessions 

All selected presenters will receive free entry to the breakout sessions (trainings are extra). There are no grants for travel and accommodations. We encourage everyone to submit a talk or training to one of our very first PostgreSQL Conference US Local events and be a part of growing the PostgreSQL community.

PGConf US and Austin PUG organized a PGConf Mini last night. It was three presentations over the evening. We had good attendance and excellent community participation. The highlight of the evening was PGConf US Co-Chair Jim Molgendski's presentation, "Top 10 Mistakes When Migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL".

We tried something new this time around. We utilized Twitter's Periscope capability to live stream his presentation. It wasn't perfect but it was our first time and we are looking forward to utilizing the platform more in the future.

Click here to watch "To Mistakes When Migrating From Oracle to PostgreSQL", and then submit a presentation to one of our upcoming conferences:

• PGConf US Local: Philly
• PGConf US Local: Seattle

Join us for a special presentation with PostgreSQL experts who will be in town for DataLayer 2017.

Food and refreshments will be provided, so please be sure to RSVP.

Thank you to OpenSCG for sponsoring our food and soft drinks, and fibercove for hosting us! Beer sponsor TBA.

• The event starts at: 6 pm 
• Networking and food/drink : 6:15 pm 
• Announcements and updates: 6:30 pm   

Presentations:
• "Softlayer vs RDS/AWS: A price to performance perspective" - Joshua D. Drake, Command Prompt, Inc.

• "PostgreSQL on Debian and apt.postgresql.org" - Dr. Michael Meskes, CEO of credativ (http://www.credativ.com/)

• "Top 10 Mistakes When Migrating From Oracle to PostgreSQL" -- Jim Mlodgenski, CTO of OpenSCG
 
About our Speakers: 

Joshua D. Drake of Command Prompt, Inc. (https://www.commandprompt.com/), is a PostgreSQL Consultant who has consulted on PostgreSQL since Postgres95. Throughout his PostgreSQL career he has performed a variety of functions within the community including releasing an O'Reilly book on PostgreSQL, as well as being part of the sysadmins and advocacy teams He ran a biannual conference series dedicated to PostgreSQL from 2007 - 2011. He is a former Director for SPI (the non-profit for PostgreSQL.org). Drake is also a Founder of United States PostgreSQL, as well as a co-organizer and Chair of PGConf US.

Dr. Michael Meskes is President and CEO of the credativ Group, an industry leader in free software services with offices in five countries. Its Open Source Support Centers employ leading members of a number of Open-Source projects. He has been Open-Source developer for twenty years working on different Open-Source projects among which Debian and PostgreSQL are most widely known. He also has done a lot of Open-Source related presentations on all sorts of events doing a lot of Open-Source evangelism.

Jim Mlodgenski is CTO of OpenSCG, a leading enterprise open source services company, with a central focus on PostgreSQL. He has been part of the PostgreSQL community for over a decade, as an architect and sales engineer. He is a Director for the U.S. PostgreSQL Association, as well as an organizer of the Philly PostgreSQL User Group and a Co-organizer of the NYC PostgreSQL User Group. He Is also a co-organizer of PGConf US, the largest PostgreSQL conference in the U.S.

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?

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

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!

1. Mastering PostgreSQL Administration by Bruce Momjian
2. Migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL by Jim Mlodgenski
3. Postgres Performance and Maintenance by Joshua (JD) Drake
4. Database Automation by Robert Bernier 

• PostgreSQL v10 an Amplified version of Postgres!
• Using Kubernetes/Docker/Helm to Deploy On-Demand PostgreSQL Streaming Replicas
• Postgres Window Magic
• BDR Around the globe

• Diamond: Amazon Web Services
• Platinum: Compose, OpenSCG, 2ndQuadrant
• Partner: Quest
• Supporter: Command Prompt
• Media: @amplifypostgres

Sponsorship opportunities for the conference are still available. If you use Postgres, support Postgres, or if you are looking to recruit a local Postgres expert, this is a great opportunity. Become a part of our dynamic and growing ecosystem! The prospectus is available at:

How do you use Postgres?

I work Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and within Fred Hutch, I work for the largest group called SCHARP, Statistical Center for HIV/AIDS Research and Prevention. We use Postgres to monitor the AIDS drug trials real time to see if the trials are working or not. This means we collect the data from doctors and labs around the world, and analyzing the data. We also have servers where we receive data from other research institutes and share our randomized data, de-personalized, with other research institutes.

What community contributions have you provided?

In 2010 I started SeaPUG, Seattle Postgres Users Group, at the request of Josh Drake. I have at least have the presentations there every year. I have also discovered several PostgreSQL: bugs which have been fixed. Some of them affected every version of PostgreSQL. Bug numbers: 7553, 8173, 8257, 8291. I also found 8545, which has not been fixed but Core has acknowledge needs to be fixed but they are not sure where it should be fixed, pg_dump or pg_dumpall. I started the PostgreSQL track at LinuxFest Northwest in 2014 after my GIS presentation in 2013 was standing room only. This year I got a booth at the SeaGL, Seattle GNU Linux, conference with the idea of having a booth there next year along with also doing a PostgreSQL presentation next year at the conference.

You recently took a renewed interest in speaking at Postgres Conferences, why?

I have been giving presentations locally now for the last 7 years and so I am now ready to move on to the next step, doing presentations at the Local and National conferences around the United States.

What is the #1 barrier you see to Postgres adoption?

People not knowing about PostgreSQL, most people know about MYSQL, MSSQL and Oracle, but do not know about PostgreSQL. This is changing, some, with the Cloud providers now offering PostgreSQL, but I go to these conferences, LinuxFest Northwest and SeaGL, and people all the time are asking me, "What is Postgres and why should I use it over MYSQL, MSSQL or Oracle", because they have never heard of PostgreSQL.

What is something you feel the wider Postgres community could be better at?

We need to promote PostgreSQL so that new people starting personal projects and starting at companies, will think about PostgreSQL before other databases. This starts with getting the younger generation interested in PostgreSQL and that also means that we need to get the college professors willing to talk about PostgreSQL in their curriculums instead of ignoring PostgreSQL for all the other competing databases. Some of this means that at all the other conferences, we need to have a PostgreSQL presence, aka booth and presentations. We should also come up with a certification method for PostgreSQL DBA's, User's, Engineer's, etc so that prospective employers will have an idea of the prospective employees skill set.

• 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)