Brass tacks

• Silicon Valley is selling tickets briskly, get yours today and join us at the largest gathering of Postgres leaders on the West Coast.

• South Africa is set to release their schedule shortly. Watch the site for opportunities in October.

• We have hinted at digital events in the past and they are in the final planning stages. Digital events will encompass best in class content from our community in the format of Webinars, Q&A sessions and Professional electronic training opportunities. Watch for more news on these unique opportunities as we get closer to Fall 2019.

Seasons

It is the middle of summer, and as Glenn Frey would say, “The Heat is on!” Summer is the time when everyone is busy, yet nobody is busy. You have a contract to execute but the signer is on vacation. You have a project to complete but your digital nomad developer took off for the beach. Suddenly even checks may be delayed because of a long weekend up in the mountains. It is also a time to catch up on the things that may have been overlooked. When the person driving your priorities is on vacation it is easier to step back and observe your purpose.

Introduction

At PostgresConf 2019 in Manhattan we organized a Diversity and Inclusion panel with the help of Plato. The panel was well attended, but not as much as we had hoped. This fact outlined that we had more work to do on expanding our leadership position within Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Professional Postgres community.

We take this topic very seriously and we would consider PostgresConf and our focus on People, Postgres, Data a success if the only outcome was for all to feel welcome and supported within our community. Thankfully we have organizers and volunteers who are passionate about this very topic.

We would like to introduce the PostgresConf and PgCentral Foundation DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) Work Group:

• Debra Cerda: DEI Organizer

• Henrietta Dombrovskaya: Contributor

• Ryan Lambert: Contributor

• Mara Lemagie: Contributor

• Vikki McCormick: Contributor

• Amanda Nystrom: Co-Chair Sponsor

Over the coming months we will be continuing to communicate our passion, our purpose, our action and our accomplishments in bringing true Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to our community.

“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus” -- Martin Luther King

PostgresConf Philly which is organized in conjunction with Philly Postgres sold out in July! A packed room, great content and glorious collaboration was available to all for free due to the generous support of the Wharton School for Business!

As we continue to build our professional relationships, connections with academia are going to be vital. Academia is one of the few spaces that Postgres has not been able to make assertive gains in adoption and it crucial to the long term vision of our community that Academia recognize and adopt Postgres as the World’s Database and a viable option for teaching the next generation of data experts.

International communication

As our community grows Internationally with strong ties to Asia, and countries in the Southern Hemisphere it becomes difficult to connect with those cultures using our normal nomenclature. In our last newsletter we used a quote meant to be a compliment and challenge to the Western communities to try new things. The quote was about pigs ears and how they are delicious. The quote was interpreted by some in the Asia community as negative.

While writing this newsletter, we had used a spelling variation for the term “Wowzers” which in American pop culture is meant to be an exclamation of amazement. However in other cultures it maintains a negative connotation causing us to change the term to Kapow. These communication challenges show us that we must be open and without pride in our communication. We must show patience and understanding with cultures that are not like ours and that the communities that are able to achieve this will lead the future of Open Source and Postgres.

“Every human is like all other humans, some other humans, and no other human” — Clyde Kluckhon

Oh my goodness, Data Days!

CFP Dates:

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

• 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)

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

Tell us about your commitment and contribution to the Postgres Community

For over 10 years, EnterpriseDB (EDB) has been working with the community and enterprises to drive Postgres forward. EDB is one of the top PostgreSQL community contributors. Two of our team members are part of Postgres Core team, while 4 are committers, and 6 are named contributors. We invest heavily into Postgres performance, scalability, availability, migration, integration and support to make sure that enterprises can take advantage of Postgres' rapid innovation cycle and advanced capabilities.

What growth pattern do you expect for yourself as well as Postgres as a whole?

Postgres adoption is exploding and we can see that in our business results. Today, we support 92 of the Fortune 500 and 311 of the Forbes Global 2000. Our customers look to us for a reliable, high-performing, and cost-effective data management platform based on open source PostgreSQL.

Our customers are using EDB Postgres for mission critical applications. Their databases range all the way up to 50 TB with some handling over 50K transaction per second in environments that require 99.99%+ availability.

Our customers’ confidence in Postgres and EDB is no surprise. Postgres has been the #1 open source relational database in the DB-Engines.com rankings for two years in a row and EnterpriseDB has been chosen for the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems for six years in a row.

How do you plan to assist Postgres in the future?

EDB continues to invest heavily in Postgres with key projects such as zHeap, Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation, and other efforts focused on performance and scalability.

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

EDB Postgres has become the general purpose database of choice for digital transformations, offering JSONB document support, GIS-support, EDB Postgres Oracle® compatibility features, key-value pair data, and increasing capabilities for analytical workloads. It has the fastest innovation cycle, the best deployment models, and the lowest cost of any commercial relational database.

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

The best thing about working with the Postgres community is their fast innovation, resulting in extremely reliable code.

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

PostgreSQL is one of the oldest and most stable open source projects as a result of the commitment of its members and its independence as a stand-alone community. Over the years, Postgres has achieved parity with proprietary platforms in terms of performance and functionality. It has received a warm welcome from businesses looking to roll back database costs and ease vendor lock-in, and leading companies are adopting it with great success. This is just like it was with Linux 15 years ago. Enterprises understand that they have to adopt Postgres or they will be left behind.

PostgresConf Beijing 2019

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Last week was PostgresConf Beijing 2019. This event was an exercise in people understanding what it truly takes to run a conference. It was a standalone event unlike PostgresOpen China in 2018 which always takes a lot more work. We had generous sponsor support with the likes of Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Pivotal, Inspur, HighGo, Credativ, and Command Prompt.

The overarching theme of the conference was of course People, Postgres, Data and we had many (translated) conversations about how Postgres can be the center of your Data Universe and how the ecosystem thrives with not only PostgreSQL but also technology such as TimescaleDB and Yugabyte. All of which are Open Source and enable People to use Postgres to manage their Data. In 2020, the plan is to have PostgresConf China in October or November. The timing will allow for a more moderate climate as well as have more time to generate international content.

English As A Second Language

As we continue to work with English-as-a-second-language communities we continue to find opportunities for them to grow and contribute. Of course the most common (and possibly difficult) opportunity is that in order to contribute code to PostgreSQL.Org, you must speak English. This is not an unreasonable requirement as English is the language of Computer Science.

A common piece of feedback we received was not that English was the consideration but the “level” of English proficiency was high. Unfortunately, verbosity is not always productive and it is certainly counterproductive when the vocabulary doesn’t take into account the non-native speaker. It would be a boost to productivity if we as a community tried to be succinct and as uncomplicated as reasonable in our communication. To put this another way and from a far more qualified source than us:

“Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.”

-- Mark Twain

Contribution Opportunities

While encouraging the Chinese community to contribute we continued to look for the low barrier of entry tasks. The obvious opportunity is translation of various project documentation. That is not the only prospect as PostgreSQL has fantastic extensibility and suggestions of developing new extensions. Contributing directly to PostgreSQL code has a high barrier of entry between English as a second language and overall overhead in building comprehensive knowledge of the core code. Extensions in contrast generally require needing to understand narrow areas of code to build a feature that is user-need specific. We are still exploring these opportunities but one option would be to invite extension authors to work with regional communities for translation or feature work.

Software You Weren’t Aware Of

Oleg from PostgresPro and PGConf.Russia was present and we were able to have some great conversations about the work they are doing, most of which can be found on Github. Although there is a lot of great software in that repository, the one that grabbed my eye as immediately useful was Zson. Zson is an extension that allows native compression of JSON/JSONB documents, greatly reducing disk space usage and increasing query speed of documents.

Please Replace IRC and Slack

Further conversations were had on how we can build a modern collaboration community that is internationally inviting, supports all languages, and is built on Open Source technologies. Initially it seems that Mattermost is a good contender but after further research it seems that we should also consider Matrix.org. The idea has barriers as the Chinese are partial to WeChat and the Professional U.S. community has left IRC for Slack, whereas other communities such as Brazil and Russia have settled on Telegram. We have a community member based working group determining next steps.

You may say that I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will be as one

-- John Lennon

Looking Forward

As People, Postgres, Data and PostgresConf continues to move forward we are looking forward to building on existing initiatives and events. We have PostgresConf Philly next week, PostgresConf Silicon Valley in September, and our next International event in October with PostgresConf South Africa. We are also continuing to work on our Inclusivity, Equit,y and Diversity initiative and launching Digital Events! This doesn’t include the growing number of meetups joining the idea of People, Postgres, Data including NYC Postgres, Silicon Valley Postgres, Philly Postgres, Seattle Postgres, and Montreal Postgres!

Quote of the week

“Those pig ears are really good.” -- Michael Meskes, Credativ and Postgresql.org committer.

Due to a rise in concern around the Omnicron variant of COVID-19 and surprise remodeling/construction from the Hilton, Postgres Conference Silicon Valley 2022 has been rescheduled. The hotel has been apologetic and accommodating. The new dates for the conference are:

April 7-8 (Thursday - Friday)

Though this was an unexpected decision, we are confident that the delay of the event will result in a positive outcome for all involved.

Thank you for your support!

Get your tickets here.