Blog

What is Distributed SQL?

A distributed SQL database is similar to a NoSQL database in that it can globally distribute data and elastically scale. At the same time, it can also deliver strong consistency, ACID transactions and support the SQL syntax like you would expect from a monolithic SQL system.

Join us at Distributed SQL Summit at PostgresConf

YugaByte DB is excited to announce the speaker schedule for this year’s Distributed SQL Summit! Expert speakers will dive deep into the use cases, best practices and next steps for successfully implementing distributed SQL as a key part of an enterprise cloud and Oracle migration strategy.

Presented in partnership with PostgresConf, the inaugural Distributed SQL Summit is taking place on September 20, 2019 in San Jose, California. The Summit is the first ever event to focus exclusively on sharing best practices and technical knowledge on the cloud-native approach to deploying, operating and scaling distributed SQL databases. The Summit is co-located with Postgres Conference Silicon Valley, as a “conference within a conference.”

This one-day event features speakers and panelists from some of the biggest names in cloud and database infrastructure including Amazon Aurora, Google Spanner, Facebook,  Kroger and YugaByte DB. Here’s a small preview of some of the scheduled talks:

 

Keynote

James Watters, SVP Products – Pivotal

 

Panel: Facebook’s Distributed Database Evolution

Jeff Rothschild, Dhruba Borthakur, Vishal Kathuria, Karthik Ranganathan

 

An Introduction to Amazon Aurora

Kamal Gupta, Head of Engineering, Aurora – Amazon

 

Google Spanner’s SQL Evolution

Campbell Fraser, Software Development Lead – Google Spanner

 

Transforming the Omni-Channel Experience at Kroger

Mahesh Tyagarajan, VP Engineering – Kroger

 

Panel: How Cloud-Native and Distributed SQL are Transforming ECommerce & Retail

Moderator: Ram Ravichandran, CTO – Narvar

 

Distributed MySQL Architectures, Past, Present and Future

Peter Zaitsev, Founder & CEO – Percona

 

Building Microservices in a Cloud-Native World with Distributed SQL

Ryan Scheidter, Lead Software Engineer – Cerner

 

Make sure to check out the complete speaker schedule and secure your tickets for PostgresConf and Distributed SQL Summit!

Learn about YugaByte DB

YugaByte DB is an open-source, cloud-native, high-performance distributed SQL database for global, internet-scale apps. And best of all, it is fully compatible with the PostgreSQL wire protocol and the SQL syntax. Built using a unique combination of high-performance document store, auto sharding, per-shard distributed consensus replication and multi-shard ACID transactions (inspired by Google Spanner), YugaByte DB serves both scale-out RDBMS and internet-scale OLTP workloads with low query latency, extreme resilience against failures and global data distribution. As a cloud native database, it can be deployed across public and private clouds as well as in Kubernetes environments with ease.

Attend Talk on Thursday

Karthik Ranganathan, YugaByte’s Co-Founder & CTO, will be highlighting the challenges faced in building a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL database in a talk titled “6 Technical Challenges Developing a Distributed SQL Database” (Thursday, September 19 at 12.30pm-12.50pm). This talk will serve as an excellent introduction to distributed SQL databases and prepare you to make the most of the Distributed SQL Summit the next day.

Visit Sponsor Table

Visit the YugaByte DB sponsor table at PostgresConf to learn how to build business-critical multi-cloud applications with maximum agility. You will see multiple demos with real-world use cases in action and have the opportunity to win some cool prizes.

See you at PostgresConf 2019 Silicon Valley

PostgresConf has always been an excellent resource for attendees to learn from their peers as well as Postgres experts. The 2019 Silicon Valley edition promises to the best ever. We look forward to connecting with you at the conference!

Jimmy Guerrero     September 03, 2019
Cybertec Logo Nameonly 01

 A database such as PostgreSQL is not just there to store data – it is also a tool to protect data. Your data must not be lost and it must not be seen by people who are unauthorized or hostile. The main goal is therefore to protect data at any cost and ensure that nothing is ever lost, leaked or compromised. As we have seen in the past more often than not a leak can easily ruin the reputation of a company or even lead to its destruction. This is true in all sectors including but not limited to finance, medical services, IT, and so on.

 

Protecting data at various levels

If you are using PostgreSQL you can protect data at various levels. The goal is to develop a comprehensive security concepts which protects from all kinds of attacks. The following aspects have to be taken into account:

  • Network security

  • Transport encryption (SSL, etc.)

  • Database level permissions

  • Data masking and obfuscation

  • Data-At-Rest Encryption (PostgreSQL TDE)

The following overview shows how to implement a sound policy at every level.

 

Ensuring network security

The first line of defense is always the network. The golden rule is: Only listen on network connections you really need and which offer a small attack surface. Fortunately, PostgreSQL has all the means to ensure security at this level.

The first thing to do is to configure the “listen_addresses” parameter in postgresql.conf. It tells PostgreSQL which bind addresses you want to use. The rule is: If you don’t have to listen on certain IPs don’t do it. To ensure security only use bind addresses which are really in use.

The second line of defense is pg_hba.conf. This config file will tell PostgreSQL how to authenticate which network segment. pg_hba.conf will be familiar to most readers so I will skip the details in this post.

However, let us assume that an attacker somehow manages to reach your database and launch a brute force attack to figure out your passwords. One way to defend against such an attack is to use the “auth_delay” extension which is part of the PostgreSQL contrib package. What is the general idea behind this extension? If an attacker launches a brute force attack auth_delay will wait some time before returning an error. This simple method will already greatly reduce your risk. Here is how it works:

# postgresql.conf

shared_preload_libraries = 'auth_delay'

auth_delay.milliseconds = '500'

Just add those lines to postgresql.conf and the module will take care of the rest.

 

Implementing transport encryption (SSL, etc.)

Once we have secured bind addresses and reduced the risk of a brute force attack it is important to protect your lines of communication. The way to do that is to use SSL. PostgreSQL supports various levels of SSL. The following levels are supported:

  • disable: I don't care about security, and I don't want to pay the overhead of encryption

  • allow: I don't care about security, but I will pay the overhead of encryption if the server insists on it.

  • prefer: I don't care about encryption, but I wish to pay the overhead of encryption if the server supports it.

  • require: I want my data to be encrypted, and I accept the overhead. I trust that the network will make sure I always connect to the server I want.

  • verify-ca: I want my data encrypted, and I accept the overhead. I want to be sure that I connect to a server that I trust.

  • verify-full: I want my data encrypted, and I accept the overhead. I want to be sure that I connect to a server I trust, and that it's the one I specify.

Depending on your performance and security requirements you can decide which level is best for you. Performance-wise SSL encryption does not come for free but if your security requirements are high it is worth paying the price.

 

Configuring database level permissions

Once you have taken care of network security, pg_hba.conf, authentication, as well as transport encryption it is time to take a look at what you can actually do inside the database.

The following layers of security are important:

  • schema: Make sure that only trusted people can access a schema

  • table: Ensure that only relevant people have access to a specific table

  • column: Restrict access to columns for specific users (to protect credit card data and alike)

  • row-level-security (RLS): Remove rows from the scope of a user

RLS (row-level-security) is especially important and promising because it allows people to only access specific rows in a table which greatly increases your ability to protect data in a very fain grained way. The important thing to keep in mind is: RLS is powerful but it requires proper testing. Some stuff is quite tricky and requires a fair amount of expertise as shown in my blog post about the topic (https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/postgresql-row-level-security-views-and-a-lot-of-magic/). If you need assistance with RLS feel free to get in touch with us. We are pleased to help.

 

Data masking and obfuscation

Studies have shown that many attacks come from within. Consider the following scenario: You are running a large online shop. Your production database is secure and nothing happens. However, your development team has to test new stuff and needs data to ensure high quality standards. What are you going to do? Do you really want to give all your developers a full copy of all your data? The trouble is: If there is no proper test data your applications will be buggy – if you hand over all your data to developers you might face issues on the legal side of you are running the risk of giving data to people you cannot fully trust under all circumstances.

The solution to the problem is Cybertec Data Masking (https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/products/data-masking-for-postgresql/). Our product will allow you to define an obfuscation model and give developers access to an obfuscated dump which can be used safely. The advantages are that the data given to developers has the same properties as the live data but does not contain personal or business critical data which should not be seen by ordinary developers.

Cybertec Data Masking provides some addons and extensions to PostgreSQL and helps you to obfuscate data in the most simple and elegant way possible. Get in touch with our sales team to find out more.

 

Enabling Data-At-Rest Encryption (PostgreSQL TDE)

Once you have secured your database using the steps outlined above you might still be faced with additional risks. What if your disks are compromised? PostgreSQL TDE (“Transparent Data Encryption”) will be the solution for you.

PostgreSQL TDE is a PostgreSQL distribution by Cybertec which automatically encrypts data on disk. All data files are safely encrypted and unless you know the key there is no way to launch your server. PostgreSQL TDE is especially useful if you are dealing with medical records, customer and financial data, which requires even more protection and security. PostgreSQL TDE is the ultimate solution to most high end security demands.

How does it work?

PostgreSQL will cypher every block as it is written to disk and decrypt data as it is read from your storage devices. Using cutting edge hardware acceleration TDE ensures superior performance and total transparency. PostgreSQL TDE can integrate into professional key stores and there is no need to store the key on the same server as the data.

 

If you are looking for PostrgreSQL TDE for PostgreSQL 11 or maybe even PostgreSQL 12 get in touch with our team here at Cybertec to find out more and to learn about this wonderful product:
https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/products/postgresql-transparent-data-encryption/

(Author: Hans-Juergen Schoenig)

 

Hans-Jürgen Schönig     August 28, 2019

Timescale Sponsor Highlight Blog for PostgresConf Silicon Valley 2019

 As part of the countdown to PostgresConf Silicon Valley, learn more about featured Partner Sponsor Timescale, including their commitment to partnering with and contributing to the Postgres community.

 

Tell us about your commitment to the PostgreSQL Community.

As some background, TimescaleDB is built on top of PostgreSQL. By using PostgreSQL as a foundation, we’re able to give users scalable SQL for time-series data. 

We’re committed to increasing the usability of PostgreSQL and its compatibility with other products in the data ecosystem, which is why we’ve created software that helps others leverage the power of PostgreSQL. In addition to TimescaleDB, we’ve created many open source tools, such as pg_prometheus, a PostgreSQL extension for data from the popular monitoring system Prometheus; the prometheus-postgresql-adapter, which allows users to use PostgreSQL as a long term store for time-series metrics from Prometheus; the TimescaleDB/Postgres editor for Grafana, which is a visual query editor for the PostgreSQL datasource in the visualization tool Grafana; and a PostgreSQL output plugin for Telegraf, a machine monitoring tool.

Understanding how the community is using Postgres helps bring more awareness to the community's diversity and needs, which is why we recently created the State of Postgres survey. If you’re a Postgres user, please contribute to the community and take the survey!

 

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

We believe that the Postgres community is rapidly growing. Everyone’s eager to get involved, willing to listen and learn, and most importantly, willing to collaborate. 

We’ve seen countless examples in the Timescale Community Slack of users jumping in to help each other solve problems or to offer interesting points of view.

The community has also proved to be a great source of talent for Timescale, as we’ve hired many engineers who were PostgreSQL users and active community members. If you’re interested in working at Timescale, see our careers page!

 

Why is Postgres an ideal foundation to build a database?

Postgres was the ideal foundation for us to build TimescaleDB because it’s open source, SQL based, and has an active community. However, the main advantage was the fact that we could leverage its 30 years of reliability and stability that was already in existence. Additionally, Postgres has a robust ecosystem and many tools/extensions available.  For these reasons, Postgres allowed us to stand on the shoulders of giants, despite being a relatively young company.

 

Tell us why you believe people should attend PostgresConf Silicon Valley 2019 in San Jose.

PostgresConf SV is a great place to learn from people using Postgres in production! You get to meet members of the community face to face and form relationships that can lead to future collaboration. 

Timescale is also giving two great talks about our work with Postgres which we encourage you to come and check out: Advanced Compression in TimescaleDB with Hybrid Row/Culmnar Storage  (Thursday, September 19 from 4:20pm - 5:10pm) and Creating Continually Up to Date Materialized Aggregates  (Thursday, September 19 from 12pm - 12:50pm).

See you at PostgresConf Silicon Valley 2019!

Amanda Nystrom     August 27, 2019

 

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

Congratulations

Henrietta Dombrovskaya, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion member for PostgresConf as well as Chicago Postgresql organizer nominated for Technologist of the Year!

 

Career Opportunity

A large, well known media company is seeking a Senior Level PostgreSQL Engineer and Architect. This is an on-site engagement, however the company is known to be lifestyle friendly with reasonable working hours, good pay, and benefits. Specific talents requested are the ability to mentor. The location is Seattle, WA. If you are interested in this position please contact randy@neuringerco.com with your resume.

Great content

Extension Highlight

We wanted to highlight some of the fantastic work that is being done by the ecosystem with Postgres Extensions. Although the base of Postgres is the amazing and extensible PostgreSQL, a lot of users don’t realize that Postgres has the feature they are looking for, if only they were to look to the ecosystem.

Notable Extensions:

  • pgaudit : The goal of pgAudit is to provide PostgreSQL users with the capability to produce audit logs often required to comply with government, financial, or ISO certifications.

  • pg_credereum : pg_credereum is a PostgreSQL extension that provides a cryptographically verifiable audit capability for a PostgreSQL database, bringing some properties of blockchain to relational DBMS.

  • H3-pg : PostgreSQL bindings for H3, a hierarchical hexagonal geospatial indexing system.

Postgres can do what?

There are a ton of Postgres compatible features out there. Some of them are overlooked core features and some of them require installing a different version of Postgres. Here are a few examples:

 

  • TimescaleDB: Time series data management with Postgres

  • YugabyteDB: Globally Distributed database with PostgreSQL compatibility

  • Postgres-XL: Horizontally partitioned PostgreSQL

  • Agensgraph: Graph capabilities with Postgres

  • PG-Strom: GPU accelerated extension for Postgres 

 

Upcoming Education and Networking opportunities:

 

Joshua D. Drake     August 07, 2019

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

Joshua D. Drake     July 31, 2019

PostgresConf Beijing 2019

Join our Mailing List | Attend one of our events |

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.

Joshua D. Drake     July 11, 2019     #postgres #postgresconf

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

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

Upcoming Events



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.

 

Joshua D. Drake     May 30, 2019

On occasion, professional developers will drop into the Postgresql.org mailing lists, meetups, and conferences to ask the question, “Why isn’t PostgreSQL development on Github?” In an effort to see if the demand was really there and not just anecdotal we ran a poll/survey over several social media platforms that asked a simple question:

 

Should PostgreSQL development move to Github?

    • Yes
    • No
    • No, but to something like Gitlab would be good

 

We received well over 300 responses and the majority (75%+) chose a move to Github or to something like Github. This was an unscientific poll but it does point out a few interesting topics for consideration:

 

  1. We need to recognize that the current contribution model does work for existing contributors. We need to have an honest discussion about what that means for the project as contributors age, change employment, and mature in their skill set, etc..
  2. Of the people that argued in comments against the move to a service, only one is a current contributor to PostgreSQL.org core code. The rest were former code contributors or those who contribute in other ways (Advocacy, System administration, etc.).
  3. Would a move to Github or similar option produce a higher rate of contribution?

 

This poll does not answer point #3; it only provides a data point that people may desire a modern collaboration platform. The key takeaway from the conversation about migrating to Github or similar service is the future generation of developers use technology such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. They expect a bug/issue tracker. They demand simplicity in collaboration and most importantly they will run a cost->benefit analysis to determine if the effort to contribute is a net positive.

 

It should also be considered that this is not just individual potential contributors. There are many corporations big and small that rely on the success of PostgreSQL. Those corporations will not contribute as much directly to PostgreSQL if the cost to benefit analysis is a net negative. They will instead contribute through other more productive means that produce a net positive when the cost->benefit analysis is run. A good example of this analysis is the proliferation of external projects such as pg_auto_failover, patroni and lack of direct contribution from innovative extension based companies.

Do we need a culture shift within PostgreSQL?

There are those within the Postgresql.org community that would suggest that we do not need a culture shift within PostgreSQL but that does not take into account the very clear market dynamics that are driving the growth of PostgreSQL, Postgres, and the global ecosystem. It is true that 20 years of hard work by Postgresql.org started the growth and it is also true that the majority of growth in the ecosystem and community is from products such as Greenplum, Aurora, Azure, and Timescale. The growth in the ecosystem is from the professional community and that ecosystem will always perform a cost to benefit analysis before contributing.

 

It is not that we should create radical rifts or disrupt our culture. It is to say that we must evolve and shift our community thinking. We need to be able to consider the big picture. A discussion should never start as an opposition to change. The idea of change should be an open discussion about possibility and vision. It should always include whether the change is a good idea and it should always avoid visceral reactions of, "works for me,” “no,” or “we tried that 15 years ago." Those reactions are immature and lacking in the very thing the community needs to continue to grow: positivity, inclusion, vision, and inspiration.

Joshua D. Drake     May 13, 2019



Seattle Postgres and People, Postgres, Data were present at the 20th Anniversary Event of LinuxFest Northwest this weekend! The “Fest” is a conference built around Free and Open Source Software, taking place in Bellingham, Washington. It is a true gathering of over 2000 Open Source practitioners. There was also a well attended Postgres Track and an “Ask the experts” panel.

Highlighted Find

Also at LinuxFest Northwest was YottaDB. YottaDB uses the PostgreSQL wire protocol to allow universal driver access to their in-memory transactional database. This has become a popular way to utilize the maturity of the PostgreSQL code base and reduce overhead in having to maintain a protocol and drivers.

Ecosystem Content

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

 

Noteworthy Commits & Releases

The PostgreSQL git repo was largely bug fixes and updates the past couple of weeks but we have some great releases including migration tools and Distributed SQL:

 

Join our community

Upcoming Events



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.

Joshua D. Drake     April 29, 2019

Latest Posts

  • What is Distributed SQL? A distributed SQL database is similar to a NoSQL database in that it can globally distribute data and elastically scale. At the same time, it can also deliver strong consi...
  •  A database such as PostgreSQL is not just there to store data – it is also a tool to protect data. Your data must not be lost and it must not be seen by people who are unauthorized or hostile. The...
  • Timescale Sponsor Highlight Blog for PostgresConf Silicon Valley 2019  As part of the countdown to PostgresConf Silicon Valley, learn more about featured Partner Sponsor Timescale, including their...
  •   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 do...
  • Congratulations Henrietta Dombrovskaya, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion member for PostgresConf as well as Chicago Postgresql organizer nominated for Technologist of the Year!   Career Opport...