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?

Community,

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

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

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.

• Monday, October 15th: Trainings and Data track
• Tuesday, October 16th: Keynotes, Dev and Ops tracks

Contact: siliconvalley@postgresconf.org

PostgresConf ran its first Silicon Valley conference on October 15th and 16th in conjunction with Silicon Valley Postgres. The two day conference was considered a “local” or development conference where our focus was introducing the PostgresConf experience to new attendees and partners with world class content. We believe we succeeded in that.

We brought new friends to the community with the addition of Yugabyte, Scalegrid, and AgensGraph. We also had old friends return with Pivotal, AWS, Microsoft, 2ndQuadrant, Timescale, Compose, and Nutanix.

This is the first conference we have organized where the attendance went up during the conference. All community conferences know the stress of waiting for people to register. We all register at the last possible moment but for attendance to increase as the conference is running was new for us. It added a new level of legitimacy to our purpose of:

Thank you to the attendees, supporters, and organizers for helping pull off yet another amazing event!

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

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