Joshua D. Drake Blog Posts

You will want to mark your calendars folks on August 15th the Call for papers for PostgresConf Silicon Valley will close. That is just two weeks away!

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

This is the inaugural Silicon Valley conference and from the current submitted papers it is shaping up to be a fantastic event. We can't wait to see everyone and continue our mission of:




Joshua D. Drake     July 31, 2018

The first ever PGConf US Local: Seattle event is happening in partnership with SEAPUG on August 11th and 12th at the Sheraton Downtown Seattle! On August 11th we have four training options available:
  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 

Tickets are now available!


On August 12th we have 14 break-out sessions between the Development and Operations tracks. A sample of our break-out sessions is available below but please check the full schedule for all of the fantastic content!
We would not be able to produce PGConf Local: Seattle 2017 without the generous support from our sponsors:
    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:
    Joshua D. Drake     July 11, 2017

    When you are considering a conference about Postgres, one should pick the one that is focused on building the community. PostgresConf is all about building the community and we even captured it on video!
     
     
    PostgresConf embraces a holistic view of what community is. We want everyone to feel welcome and encouraged to give back to PostgreSQL.org. However, that is not the only opportunity for you to give back to the Postgres community. We all have different talents and some of those don't extend to writing patches or Docbook XML. 

    Giving back

    When considering who is part of the community and who is contributing to the community, we want to introduce you to a couple of fantastic organizers of our conference: Debra Cerda and Viral Shah. Some in the community will know Debra. She has been in the community for years and is one of the primary organizers of Austin Postgres.
     
    Debra Cerda

    Debra is our Attendee and Speaker Liaison as well as our Volunteer Coordinator. She is also a key asset in the development and performance of our Career Fair.

     
    Viral Shah

    Viral is our on-site logistics lead and is part of the volunteer acquisition team. It is Viral that works with the hotel using a fine tooth comb to make sure everything is on target, on budget, and executed with extreme efficiency.

     
    Without her amazing attention to detail and dedication to service we wouldn't be able to deliver the level of conference our community has come to expect from PostgresConf.
     

    Building relationships

    There a lot of reasons to go to a conference. You may be looking for education on a topic, a sales lead, or possibly just to experience a central location of top talent, products, and services. All of these reasons are awesome but we find that the most important reason is to build relationships. The following are two exceptional examples of community projects.
     
    Our first example is ZomboDB. No, they are not a sponsor (yet!) but they have a fantastic Open Source extension to Postgres that integrates Elasticsearch into Postgres. 
     
    Our second ecosystem community member is an entity that most have heard of at this point; TimescaleDB. It too is a fantastic showing of what is possible when you combine brilliance with the extensibility of Postgres.
     
    What is notable about these two mentions is that they represent what we would call, "Professional Community." Recently ZomboDB wanted to bounce some ideas off of a Postgresql hacker regarding the Index Access Method API. We at PostgresConf were able to facilitate an introduction to Timescale and a couple of amazing minds ended up chewing the fat on their respective projects. It's relationships such as these that enable the community to grow and offer the best opportunities possible.
     
     

    Part of the community

    Join the Professional user and ecosystem community for Postgres today! You can start by submitting a presentation to the upcoming PostgresConf 2019 being held March 18th - 22nd, 2019 at the Sheraton Times Square.
     
     
     

     
    Joshua D. Drake     November 26, 2018



    The following table contains a summary profit and loss statement for PostgresConf US 2018.



    In review of these numbers two things will probably jump out at you:
    1. Venue and F&B of 238,000.12
    2. Net Revenue of 202,201.62
    Yes, we spent almost 250,000.00 dollars on the venue and food and beverage. In fact, the Food and Beverage alone was over 135,000.00 dollars. 

    We were fortunate to have very strong ticket sales as well as partner support through Sponsorships. This support will allow us to not only meet our financial requirements for PostgresConf Silicon Valley 2018 but will help us make our financial requirements for our European, Chinese, and US conferences in 2019. We are also hoping to set aside more money for our popular diversity and professional development initiatives.

    The Chairs would like to thank all our organizers, volunteers, partners and attendees for helping us continue advocacy of People, Postgres, Data!


    Joshua D. Drake     May 25, 2018

     

    It is late August, 2019. This is the time where we are usually prepping for the very busy fall season and not much else. However, this is the Year of Postgres and everyone is driving 200MPH down the ecosystem highway (321.8688/KPH). We are going to kick off this newsletter with some exciting information about the community.

    Events

    PostgresConf has launched Digital Events! The goal of Digital Events is to open our education platform year round to all members of the community. Our first series of events will be held with our ecosystem partner YugabyteDB and their “Distributed SQL Webinar Series.” This is a series of free-to-attend Webinars exploring Distributed SQL from leaders in the field.

     

    PostgreConf Silicon Valley tickets are going at a brisk pace and half day trainings are almost sold out. Register today to reserve your seat before prices go up on September 1st!

     

    Right after Silicon Valley, PostgresConf South Africa is kicking off. This conference has grown by leaps and bounds over the last two years. We highly recommend attending for anyone who can!

     

    PGConf.IN (India) has announced that their conference will be held in February 2020!

    Meetups

    We have seen the launch of three new meetups this month:

    • Los Angeles Postgres The first meetup is planned for late October or early November as we continue to build the Silicon Beach community.
    • Toronto Postgres Similar to Los Angeles, the first meetup is planned for late October or early November.
    • Charm City Postgres This meetup was formed by long time community member Robert Treat.

     

    Several other meetups are growing quickly: 

     

    Interested in speaking or hosting a meetup? Contact us and we’ll connect you with the right people! 

    Learn

    Here is a short, great introduction tutorial on running PostgreSQL in Docker by Igal Sapir, Los Angeles Postgres organizer. Everybody has 13 minutes.

     

    Shawn Wang from our friends at High Go has provided an insightful write-up on AES Performance.

    Ecosystem

    TimescaleDB is running a “State of Postgres” survey. Please take five minutes and help them out! They have also announced a new Distributed Timeseries product.

     

    VMWare has just acquired Greenplum and PostgreSQL supporting company Pivotal.

    Postgresql.org

    PostgreSQL versions 11.5, 10.10, 9.6.15, 9.5.19, 9.4.24, and 12 Beta 3 are now out in the wild and addressing several important security concerns and bug fixes.

     

    ---

     

    Have news you’d like included in future newsletters? Contact us.

    Joshua D. Drake     August 23, 2019

    In 2016 we started working with horizontal communities. We wanted to make sure that PgConf US was an inclusive community that advocated not only for the best database in the world but also all the external Open Source technologies that make the best database in the world the best platform in the world. 

    This year we wanted to continue building a stronger community through relationships and our efforts are proving successful. We have joined forces with several horizontal communities to bring original and related content to PgConf US. The first is Big Apple Py. They are working with PgConf US to run a full track of Python content as well as a development workshop. 


    The workshop is particularly interesting as it will focus on a code sprint to develop a mature and user friendly Python based conference software. I wonder if they know we already use a Ruby on Rails solution...

    We also have a great workshop being presented by DockerNYC and Jesse White: Automating production ready databases in Docker
    DockerNYC
    PgConf US 2017 is less than two weeks away and we continue to work with communities to bring you even more new content! Stay tuned as we expect to announce more workshops in the next few days. If you haven't purchased your tickets, today would be a good day.
    Joshua D. Drake     March 15, 2017

    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.

     

    Company Description
    EnterpriseDB (EDB), the database platform company for digital business, delivers the premier open source-based data platform for new applications, cloud re-platforming, application modernization, and legacy migration. EDB Is the developer of the most complete Postgres-based database platform.

     

    Joshua D. Drake     February 12, 2019


    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.

    Joshua D. Drake     December 12, 2017

    Announcing PostgresConf Silicon Valley 2019, September 18th - 20th at the Hilton San Jose! An absolute perfect pairing of training, breakout sessions, and a fantastic weekend break to enjoy the valley for every speaker, attendee, volunteer, and organizer. 

    Didn't you just host the community at PostgresConf Silicon Valley, you ask? Why yes we did! That event was October 15th and 16th of 2018. The event was such an unexpected success that we immediately started working with the hotel to lock in our dates for 2019. We requested mid-October to early November. Unfortunately, the only week they had available was the week of September 15th, 2019. We are again working with the Silicon Valley Postgres Meetup; the fastest growing Postgres meetup in the United States. 

    As we continue to be the fastest growing, non-profit, inclusive, and volunteer organized event we are providing you the breakdown of the Silicon Valley 2018 financials:


    PostgresConf Silicon Valley is much more cost effective than the "big" conference in Manhattan and that is exactly what we want as a development or "local" conference. We are targeting 50% growth for 2019 and we want do so in a way that is inviting to new community members that won't overwhelm them. We succeeded with that in 2018 and we are going to continue the mission of People, Postgres, Data!

    The global non-profit Postgres Conference Series


    Joshua D. Drake     November 14, 2018

    PostgresConf Silicon Valley is being held October 15th-16th at the Hilton San Jose and the schedule is now available.


    The two day event received over 80 submissions! A lot of the usual and legendary speakers are present but we were pleasantly surprised to find that so many new (to the conference) speakers submitted. It shows that the mission of People, Postgres, Data is growing at an amplified rate. The presentations are all of the "best-in-class quality" our attendees have come to expect from PostgresConf events.



    Whether your needs are Big Data, Google Cloud, AWS RDS, GPDR Compliance, or you just have a burning desire to learn more about Kubernetes, PostgresConf Silicon Valley has you covered!

    We also have two fantastic training opportunities which are the first of their kind:



    Joshua D. Drake     September 04, 2018