Joshua D. Drake Blog Posts

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.

Joshua D. Drake     January 05, 2022

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

Welcome to a new and bigger year for Postgres in 2018!

As our events have grown and evolved, so has our branding. We started as a small pgDay event, grown to a larger pgConf and now we are happy to announce that we matured into a full week long event called PostgresConf.

PostgresConf US 2018 is focused on People, Postgres and Data. People are the driving force behind the Postgres Ecosystem from the hackers writing the code, to the advocates telling the world about Postgres and to the administrators and developers using Postgres day to day. They will all be represented at PostgresConf.

 

Tickets

We have excellent news for you all: registration is open for PostgresConf US 2018 and discounted Early Bird tickets are just $399 -- $200 off the regular $599 -- and available through January 31, 2018, at https://postgresconf.org/conferences/2018

Please note that the early bird registration admits one person to the main conference sessions on Wednesday April 18 - Friday April 20, 2018, the Regulated Industry Summit, the Greenplum Summit, the Community Summit, and all evening activities from Wednesday - Friday. This registration does NOT include any training sessions on Monday April 16 or Tuesday April 17. Tickets for the training sessions are available separately, at $199 for half-day training and $499 for a full day training.

Day passes will be available for single day admission Wednesday through Friday, for $299 -- why not register early and get all 3 days for just $100 more?!


About our Conference

The Postgres Ecosystem is more than just the exceptional PostgreSQL database. It encompasses tools, solution, and services that enterprises demand for their mission-critical applications. PostgresConf brings the whole ecosystem under a single roof so enterprises can learn about all of the possible ways Postgres can be used in their environments.
 
This year, we are back in Jersey City from April 16th to April 20th at The Westin Jersey City Newport.  We also listened to our past attendees and expanded our training classes to 2 days so on April 16th and 17th, we are pleased to offer training sessions taught by professional trainers to bring additional depth to your learning experience. That will be followed by 3 days of great talks on April 18th - 20th. Additionally, we will host our 4th annual Regulated Industry Summit as well as the inaugural Greenplum Summit.

CFP

Want to present?  Our CFP is open!  Please visit https://postgresconf.org/conferences/2018 for Call for Papers information.  

Where to Stay

For those planning to attend, don’t forget to book your room early for the best rates. The Westin Jersey City Newport is the best place to stay and enjoy all conference activities. Attendees will surely mingle at the Westin bar and hallways throughout the afternoon and long into the evening. We have reserved a block of rooms at the special conference rate of $260/night plus applicable taxes for attendees who make their reservations via this dedicated Westin booking page. The hotel block will fill up quickly. The special rates will be available until March 26 or until the group block is sold out. 

 

Sponsors

Sponsorship opportunities for the conference are still available. If your business PostgreSQL based products or services or if you are looking to recruit a PostgreSQL expert at our job fair, this is the place to be. Don’t miss your chance to be part of this dynamic and growing ecosystem. Download the sponsorship prospectus at:
https://postgresconf.org/conferences/2018/sponsorships

Our current premium sponsors are:

Diamond: Amazon Web Services, Pivotal
Platinum: Compose, OpenSCG, 2ndQuadrant, Microsoft
Gold: Cybertec, JetBrains, Citus Data, EnterpriseDB

For more information, please visit https://postgresconf.org/conferences/2018

We look forward to seeing you in April!
 
Joshua D. Drake     December 19, 2017


On August 15th, Silicon Valley Postgres held their first Postgresql.org Patch Review workshop. The workshop was hosted by PostgresConf partner Pivotal. Attendees’ feedback indicate that we have found a great way to show how companies within the community can benefit Postgresql.org, Postgres User groups, and help us fulfill our mission:


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:
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.


Silicon Valley Postgres is also working with PostgresConf Silicon Valley to bring a high quality and cost effective education solution to the users of Postgres within the Silicon Valley. Early Bird tickets are now on sale and available. You will want to hurry as the Early Bird price ends on September 1st, 2018.
Joshua D. Drake     August 16, 2018

 

At Postgres Conference we are always optimizing our People, Postgres, Data experience, and as more events move to Digital,  we have worked hard to perfect that collaborative experience for our community. The hard work of our volunteers has paid off, our content is top notch, and our participant account is consistently high.

 

With a now-proven track record, we are pleased to announce that we are accepting Community and Commercial presentations via the Postgres Webinar Series Call for Presentations through the end of 2020. If your presentation is accepted we will contact you directly to arrange an appropriate time to deliver your content.

Recent awesome news

KDE, arguably the most complete desktop experience for Linux, is now hosted on a private instance of Gitlab. As is proper, Gitlab only supports Postgres as the backend database.

For those who who love #FarmFresh or #farmtotable, there is a new website that showcases Farms that are delivering. It was developed using React, Rails, and Postgres. 

Upcoming Digital Events

  • July 7, 10am PT: Deep Dive into PostgreSQL Indexing

A Deep Dive into PostgreSQL Indexing

  • July 15, 10AM PT: Working with JSON Data in PostgreSQL vs. MongoDB

Working with JSON Data in PostgreSQL vs. MongoDB

Previous Digital Events:

 

Image result for seattle hd wallpaper


It is with great pleasure that we announce the final program for PGConf Local: Seattle. The schedule is still being hammered out but we have finalized the content that will be presented. Please join us in celebrating Postgres in Seattle!

 
The conference is the first Postgres event to be held in Seattle since 2009 and we have received a lot of positive feedback from the local Postgres and Data communities. Clearly Postgres has been missed in the Emerald City!
 
Training Options:
Breakout Sessions:

Track: Ops

  • Develop intelligent apps on the Azure platform using the Azure Database for PostgreSQL by Sunil Kamath
  • Tuning PostgreSQL for High Write Workloads by Grant McAlister
  • POSTGRESQL V10: AN AMPLIFIED VERSION OF POSTGRES by Joshua D. Drake
  • Enterprise Data Architecture with PostgreSQL by Kevin Kempter
  • All the dirt on Vacuum by Jim Nasby
  • Building a scalable time-series database on PostgreSQL by Matvey Arye

Track: Dev

  • Semantic Search Web System on PostgreSQL by QUAN-HA LE
  • Increase Application Performance with SQL Auto-Caching; No Code Changes by Roland Lee
  • Introduction to JavaScript Stored Procedures by Jim Mlodgenski
  • Under the hood: API integrations and more in an energy efficiency PostgreSQL + Django application by Jennifer Scheuerell
  • Using GIS in PostgreSQL by Lloyd Albin

Tracks: Big Data, Data Science and AWS/Cloud

  • With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility by Michael Sacks
  • Data Quality Expert Is Not Harvard's Sexiest Job...But... by Ben Rogojan
  • GRAKN.AI: the hyper-relational database for knowledge-oriented systems by Haikal Pribadi
  • Best Practices with Managed PostgreSQL in the Cloud by Jignesh Shah
PGConf Local: Seattle is made possible by the wonderful team of volunteers including the Seattle Postgres User Group and our sponsors:
 
 
Diamond2
 
Platinum: Compose.IO, OpenSCG, 2ndQuadrant, and Microsoft
Joshua D. Drake     October 19, 2017

Where is your path leading you?

 

At Postgres Conference Silicon Valley I promised during the launch that after the conference was completed PostgresWarrior and I would be taking a freedom tour to various National Parks. 

 

For us, our path is serving the community through education and professional and personal development. This happens in many forms including these newsletters.

 

Recent projects have been coordinating a successful webinar series from Yugabyte, creating  online live Postgres instructor lead training, and launching a new educational series on PostGIS. This is all happening while the Call for Papers for Postgres Conference 2020 now open! The ongoing goal is to allow any person to receive the education they need to be successful with People, Postgres, Data year around.

Training

The current training options from Postgres Conference can be found here:

https://postgresconf.org/conferences/Postgres-Digital-Training-Series/schedule/events

We have two performance trainings coming up in October:

  • PostgreSQL Performance & Maintenance on October 29th
  • Finding and Fixing Slow Queries on October 30th

 

Both of these training opportunities sell out at the physical conferences. They are solid content and at a reasonable price (149.00 USD ) it is hard to say no to a few hours for education in your day!

Software

Are you frustrated with the limitations and fragility of Logical Replication in PostgreSQL Core? There is a new software on the block called pgcat and it has an impressive list of features to allow your Logical Replication experience to be exceptional.

 

Looking for a simple script to help find tuning opportunities for PostgreSQL? The perl script postgresqltuner may just be what you are looking for. Yes, there really is an active developer community for the Perl language still.

 

A HyperLogLog data type for PostgreSQL from our friends at Citus. This Postgres module introduces a new data type hll which is a HyperLogLog data structure. HyperLogLog is a fixed-size, set-like structure used for distinct value counting with tunable precision. For example, in 1280 bytes hll can estimate the count of tens of billions of distinct values with only a few percent error.

 

Our partner Heimdall Data has been creating a new type of connection pool that removes a significant limitation within other software such as PgBouncer and PgPool. If you are looking for Enterprise Authentication (Active Directory/LDAP) as well as intelligent pooling for many users (and connections), it may be worth a look. There is a webinar next week on how it all works!

Does your path allow people to “Come as you are?”

In consideration of all of the great news from our community we can’t help but reflect on the blessings we have in the world of Open Source. Remember that Open Source is about exceptionalism, creativity, and most importantly freedom. When communities start restricting these three tenets of Open Source, they are no longer Open Source communities, even if their software is.

 

The theme for Postgres Conference 2020 in NYC is “come as you are” and we are asserting this mantra throughout our entire community. Over the past few years there has been an influx of toxicity throughout all circles and it is time for civility and grace to return. It is time to remember that we are all human. We all have angels and demons to our personalities. We are all flawed and we are all exceptional in our own way.

 

"But just because I don't agree with someone on everything doesn't mean that I'm not going to be friends with them. When I say, 'be kind to one another,' I don't only mean the people that think the same way that you do. I mean be kind to everyone."

 

-- Ellen DeGeneres

 

(Yes, this happened. No, it wasn’t planned.) 

Just outside of Moab Utah.

 

Find YOUR path.



Joshua D. Drake     October 17, 2019

The International Postgres conference  series continues to grow! PGConf APAC 2018 is the latest PGConf.Org addition.

Following the success of two consecutive pan-Asia Postgres event - pgDay Asia 2016 and pgDay Asia 2017 held along with FOSSASIA, we are pleased to announce PGConf APAC 2018 to be held in Singapore from 22nd to 24th of March, 2018. Once again the conference will be held along with FOSSASIA - one of the largest FOSS conference on the planet. PGConf APAC will be PostgreSQL conference series for all PostgreSQL enthusiasts and users in the Asia Pacific region.
For more details on FOSSASIA - http://2018.fossasia.org
You will be able to enjoy one of the largest PostgreSQL conference in Asia and one of the largest FOSS conferences to meet like minded individuals in the same week!
pgDay Asia 2016 and pgDay Asia 2017 would not have been possible without your awesome talks and we would like to invite speakers from all over the globe to present at the PGConf APAC 2018. We would like to open Call For Paper for PGConf APAC 2018. Some of the topics which can be used for submitting a talk are-
  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
For more examples you can refer to the papers which were presented at last year's event - 2016 and 2017.
Of course we are happy to accept paper proposals on any other interesting topics as well.
To submit you proposal for presentation please go to this link - http://2018.pgconfapac.org/cfp
Venue
To be Announced
Call for Papers
2017-10-10: Proposals acceptance begins
2017-12-04: Proposals acceptance ends
2017-12-13: Authors of accepted proposals contacted
If you need any additional information please contact our team at pgconfapac(at)googlegroups(dot)com.
This conference is organized by the PostgreSQL people from Asian communities. If you have any question, feel free to contact us on pgconfapac(at)googlegroups(dot)com.
For sponsorship related queries please get in touch with our team at apac-organizer(at)pgconf(dot)org.
Joshua D. Drake     October 10, 2017

Silicon Valley Postgres and PostgresConf Silicon Valley are happy to announce that early bird tickets are now available! You can purchase them here. You will want to hurry as early bird discounted tickets are only available until September 1st, 2018.

PostgresConf Silicon Valley takes place on October 15th and 16th, 2018 at the Hilton San Jose. The schedule is not finalized. However, we have a comprehensive list of content from technical leaders in the Postgres ecosystem we are reviewing. Here is a brief list of some (but not all!) of the topics to be presented:

  • Postgres 11
  • Data integrity at scale
  • Distributed data and GPDR
  • Massively Parallel Postgres for Analytics
  • Data intersection between roles
  • RDS tips and tricks
  • I didn’t know Postgres could do that!
  • Performant time-series data management analytics
The Silicon Valley schedule is expected to be published this week and we are looking forward to seeing you all in October!

PostgresConf is organized by an all volunteer team of fantastic individuals and is backed by a 501c3 non-profit. The Silicon Valley conference provides the most cost effective avenue to learn all about Postgres and the Postgres ecosystem. We invite everyone to enjoy our expertly delivered presentations, good food, the hallway track and the opportunity to learn, network and appreciate everything that is Postgres.

Joshua D. Drake     August 21, 2018

Come as you are

The theme of Postgres Conference for 2020 is: Come as you are. We want everyone to feel welcome. You are welcome for your love of People, Postgres, Data and a desire to ascend beyond the box. It isn’t about your race, gender, sexuality, political affiliation, or love of blueberry flavored popcorn. It is 100% about you, the creativity and excellence that only you can bring to our community.

Postgres Conference 2020 CFP now open

We are actively seeking content for the largest Postgres Conference in the world, set to be held from March 23rd to 27th, 2020  at the Marriott Marquis, Time Square! Please submit your content here.

Postgres Conference Silicon Valley 2019

Postgres Conference Silicon Valley doubled its attendance, making it the largest Postgres  Conference on the West coast ever! We are very pleased to be able to bring so many community members together for education, fun, and ecosystem support!

 

Training

  • Postgres Conference is now offering live digital training throughout the year. Continuing on our mission of creating exceptional Postgres people, you can now not only register for pre-defined training but request specific training and we will connect you with a class! The current training options are:
    • PostgreSQL Performance and Maintenance
    • Finding and Fixing slow queries
    • Postgres + Kubernetes: yes it really is a match made in heaven
    • PostgreSQL Replication deployment and best practices
    • PgPool-II Performance and best practices

 

Register here: https://postgresconf.org/conferences/Postgres-Digital-Training-Series

 

Digital Events

We have free digital events coming up including topics such as Kubernetes, DistributedSQL, Backups, Postgis and many more. Coming up: 

Joshua D. Drake     October 02, 2019