With more than 200 events submitted and approximately 80 slots to be filled, this has been the most difficult schedule to arrange in the history of PostgresConf. By far, the majority of content received we wanted to include in the schedule. It is that level of community support that we work so hard to achieve and we are thankful to the community for supporting PostgresConf. There is no doubt that the number one hurdle the community must overcome is effective access to education on Postgres. The US 2018 event achieves this with two full days of training and three full days of breakout sessions, including the Regulated Industry Summit and Greenplum Summit.

See something you like? Then it is time to buy those tickets!

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?

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.

Scale, already built

 

We had a call with an ecosystem partner recently about a user that has over 20TB residing in our most beloved database. The response from the partner? “They are going to fall over.” It was an interesting response and also shows a lack of understanding of the absolute power and flexibility of Postgres implementations. This production installation (in the manufacturing industry) does not fall over and it sails over the waves like the 20’ swells don’t exist. The World’s Database is already scale built!

Shoutouts

Postgres Conference Beijing CFP

CFP Closes June 3rd! Submit your presentation now!

Postgres Conference Silicon Valley

Early bird tickets now available! Get your tickets today as we expect this year to sell out!

Postgresql.org, Postgresql v12 Beta 1 released: Test now!

Developer Week New york

• A fantastic conference that believes in the same ideals as Postgres Conference and People, Postgres, Data. It takes place June 17th - 20th.

The “People” part of People, Postgres, Data

The International Postgres Conference Series known as PostgresConf has the mission of “People, Postgres, Data.” It is based on the belief that taking care of and providing opportunities for people is our core goal.

 

In the coming months Co-Chair Amanda Nystrom will be spearheading a professional development series focused on the People part of the “People, Postgres, Data” mission. It will include articles, workshops, and, if all works out, a track at the event in 2020 at Times Square, New York City. We are excited to be expanding our serving of People through this opportunity.  

Ecosystem Content

• OLTP workload performance improvement in Greenplum 6
• Parallel PostGIS and PgSQL 12
• YugaByte DB Engineering Update
• DASH: Four Properties of Kubernetes-Native Databases
• 2019 PostgreSQL Trends Report: Private vs. Public Cloud, Migrations, Database Combinations & Top Reasons Used

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 areas including dates, venues, or a desire to join the amazing People, Postgres, Data team, let us know at organizers@postgresconf.org.

 

Join our community

• News and Announcements

Upcoming Events

• Postgres Ibiza
• Postgres Conference Beijing
• Postgres Conference Silicon Valley
• Postgres Conference South Africa

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.

 

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 :) .

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.

As Postgres Conference pushes forward in the brave new world, we evolve and increase the ability for the People, Postgres, Data community to succeed. As a part of our positive adaptation we have a new website that features upcoming events, professional content (written and video), and the best in our written community via “Community Content”.

Discord

In an effort to provide a modern, friendly, and inclusive community platform, we have launched a Discord server for all things Postgres. We are providing a helpful experience with rule #1 being: Be Nice. Our discussions will branch out beyond the core of PostgreSQL and provide a forum for success with Postgres and related technologies. Join us for what is guaranteed to be a refreshing experience for the community: https://discord.gg/tjxNBCz

2021

We are seeking feedback from our community on 2021 in-person events. We are currently considering the East Coast event for October 2021 and the West Coast event for December 2021. Please help us in determining the type of event you would like to participate in!

Upcoming live events

We currently have the following webinars scheduled through October:

• September 9th, 10AM PST: PostgreSQL Parallelism Do’s and Don’ts
• September 15th, 10AM PT: Monitoring Strategy Considerations
• September 29th, 10AM PST: Introduction to PostgreSQL ColumnStore Indexes

• September 16, 10AM PT: How To Query Against Multiple Postgres Instances As If They're One Server Using Starburst Presto
• September 29, 10AM PST:Introduction to PostgreSQL ColumnStore Indexes
• September 30, 10AM PT: Live Demo: Creating A Single Point Of Access To Multiple Postgres Servers Using Starburst Presto
• October 14, 10AM PT: Live Demo: Live Demo: Unlock Data In Postgres Servers To Query It With Other Data Sources LIke Hive, Kafka, Other DBMSs, And More.

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.

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? 

So let's point your Firefox, Google Chrome, or Safari app to this link right here and get your presentation submitted.