Dirk Jagdman will demonstrate his multi-master replication system for PostgreSQL.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 7:00 PM
EzRez San Francisco
50 1st Street 7th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105

There will probably be free food (but there's a chance you'll be asked to chip in). RSVP to our Meetup page or the mailing list.

We had our first meeting today and it was a great success! We had an even dozen folks, a great discussion of the future of the PUG, and everyone managed to stay awake during my presentation!

We agreed to having the next meeting Tuesday, June 3rd, 7PM at Sun.

Everyone who's interested in the AustinPUG should sign up on the mailing list.

Topic for Consideration:
May's LAPUG meeting will be held at Cal-Poly Pomona. Keith Larson will be delivering a presentation on implementing non-trivial update-able views in PostgreSQL.

Preparatory Home Work:
This meeting will be hosted and attended by Cal-Poly Computer Science students. They would like us to give a 2 to 5 minute introduction on why we choose to use PostgreSQL in our profession in place of the other database brands that are available.

Time:
May 30, 7:00 pm

Location:
Cal-Poly Pomona - Building 8 Room 4
3801 West Temple Avenue
Pomona, CA 91767

Map:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=1025085173801407...
http://www.csupomona.edu/map/campus/building/bldg_008.shtml

Taking a head count:
Feel free to invite anyone that may be interested in coming to a PUG meeting. For those that are planning to attend please send an email to the LAPUG mailing list. (If food can be provided, it will help to know how much to bring.)

Job Postings:
http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/385

April's LAPUG Recap:
Matthew with Secom introduced LAPUG to the work of Security, Ticketing, and Financial Transaction equipment. We toured his build seeing the various stages of equipment fabrication, and then made our way to the PostgreSQL area. Seeing software, firmware, and hardware being designed and integrated was a very interesting experience. Our discussion evolved into PostgreSQL's Tuning Parameters. Each of the LAPUGers have tinkered with different parameters. However, it seems that more research can be done to understand how each turning parameter affects PostgreSQL. In regard to each parameter, what tests can be applied to PostgreSQL to determine if the parameter should be adjusted? These are good points for review.

Joining the LAPUG mailing list: http://mail.postgresql.org/mj/mj_wwwusr?domain=postgresql.org&func=lists...

LAPUG Meeting Schedule: http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/379

This past weekend, Selena, Mark & I loaded up Mark's car with flyers, mugs & t-shirts & headed up to Bellingham, WA for Linuxfest NW (website: http://linuxfestnorthwest.org/).

Several LUGs in the area host this annual conference. This was my first Linuxfest & I was really impressed - it was very well-organized, well-attended and FUN.

Mark gave his talk about ptop/pgtop first thing Saturday morning. We managed to see some other talks too - Selena checked out some Drupal talks & I went to Eric Hopper's IPv6 discussion on Sunday.

We all had a great time running the booth, despite the lack of JD's entertaining presence. He was replaced by surprise guest boothster, Chris Travers! Chris showed up to give a LedgerSMB talk and we conned him into boothbeasting with us. Thanks, Chris! Even though it was crowded behind our table, I think four staffers was the right (minimum!) number to have for handling questions & greeting people.

The conference was really packed. I think I talked at length to somewhere around 12-15 people. We had a HUGE range of questions, all the way from people wondering about replication strategies to "What's a database, anyway?" We also ran through the inevitable "how do you pronounce it?" Selena gave a long demo of pgadmin to someone who is currently using SQL Server. A lot of people are very interested in a MySQL -> PostgreSQL migration tool.

We ran out of almost all printed materials we'd brought on the first day, necessitating phone calls to Josh B to acquire more flyers and a local copy shop to print them. Selena had the brilliant idea to get some elephant logo stickers printed as well; they were very popular.

Saturday night, Silicon Mechanics hosted the afterparty at the American Museum of Radio & Electricity, a truly excellent site for a geek party! We got to dink around with static electricity machines & toys from past centuries. Selena stepped up to the theramin while Mark & I checked out the old music boxes. The best part of the evening for me was when the docents set up a small tesla coil. >:) We had a great little indoor lightning show & Selena became part of a multi-person chain that lit up a fluorescent tube.

Back home now, attempting to recover from Conference Brain.

Part of Austin's Geek culture? Work for a company using an open source database? Interested in Keeping Postgres Weird?

Then join us at the first meeting of the Austin Postgres User's Group on Tuesday, May 6th at 6PM!

The rough agenda will be:
6:00 - 6:30 Meet 'n greet
6:30 - 7:15 Discuss goals for the AustinPUG
7:15 - 7:45 Presentation: What's new it 8.3?
7:45 - 8:00 Wrap-up

The meeting will be held at Sun's offices in Riata:

Sun Microsystems
Building 8 - Longhorn Conference Room
5300 Riata Park Ct
Austin, TX 78727
Map

We will have to register everyone who is attending as a visitor; to make this as efficient as possible, please RSVP to austinpug@decibel.org. Oh, and there's one more reason to register...

FREE PIZZA!

I'll be ordering from Mangia's; please let me know if you'd rather chow down on spinach, pepperoni, or Chicago style (or if you really can't eat any of the above...)

Thanks everyone who came out for the meeting! Next meeting on our schedule will be about Python and PostgreSQL, courtesy of Jason Kirtland.

We had a terrific turnout, and four new people. One of the FreeGeek folks came and talked with me after the meeting about how he had changed the database that FreeGeek uses from MySQL to PostgreSQL a while back.

We had two people from InnoTech attend that had also seen my 5-minute schpeale. One had already planned on coming (Hi Mike!), but I take credit for getting Craig interested! The other new person, Ed, works with Mike on Rails application development.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

PDXPUG PgDay before OSCON is happening July 20, 2008! We have some volunteers to help organize it, I'm setting up a mailing list. Those who volunteered, expect some email this weekend about kicking things off.

PostgreSQL Conference East was a total success! ~100 people
Check out details at http://www.postgresqlconference.org/

MEETING DETAILS:

David's presentation was both an introduction to Rails development, and a tutorial on getting Rails to work with PostgreSQL. Some of his examples came directly from his work on I Want Sandy (www.iwantsandy.com), a web-based product that uses PostgreSQL.

There was intense discussion of drivers with thank-yous to Jeff Davis for adopting the Ruby PostgreSQL driver. There were useful, detailed examples of how to create data migrations and develop queries for Rails. There was a lot of monkey patching.

I enjoyed this talk so much. You can find audio of David's presentation of this talk at PostgreSQL Conference West here: http://www.postgresqlconference.org/fall2007_audio/RoR_Essentials.mp3

David is going to pass the updated slides on to me, and I'll post them on http://pugs.postgresq.org/pdx

Mark also brought the T2000 that was donated to the new Performance Lab that Mark is setting up. He's working with Joshua Drake on getting the machine racked and set up to run tests! Gabrielle used her serial-fu to help him get the machine booted and running.

Many of us retired to the Lucky Lab for refreshments.

Check out Baltimore / Washington PUG. They're first meeting is on May 14th, 2008.

Subscribe to the mailing list (or the RSS feed) so that you don't miss out! Mailing list is bwpug@postgresql.org. To subscribe, send the message "subscribe bwpug" in the body of the email to majordomo@postgresql.org.

Meeting in one week!

Date: Thursday, April 17, 2008
Time: 7:00pm (that's 1900 hours.)
Place: FreeGeek

Our own David Wheeler will give a repeat performance of his talk from PostgreSQL Conference West 2007:

Ruby on Rails Essentials for PostgreSQL Enthusiasts

Has all the hype got you jazzed to develop Ruby on Rails applications on PostgreSQL? Is virtually everything you find about Rails MySQL- specific? Come to this talk to learn all you need to know to make Rails and PostgreSQL work together harmoniously. Topics will likely include:

* The ins and outs of Rails migrations
* How to add support for foreign key constraints
* Managing partial indexes and other PostgreSQL-specific objects
* Working with views
* Monkey patching for fun and profit
* Supporting multi-column primary keys
* The joys and pains of Rails collections
* Working with time zones
* The antiquity of the Ruby PostgreSQL driver (NOT)
* Enforcing constraints in Rails *and* in the database
* Getting Rails to execute *your* queries instead of its own
* Saved queries for "fat models"

---
See you there!

When: Tuesday, April 8, 7:30pm
Where: Casa Donde, Oakland
What: John Zarrella shows how PostgreSQL helps a small business make a crucial transition.

Hey, y'all; let's hit the ATLPUG IRC channel at 7:30 this (Tuesday, 8 April) evening to brainstorm about topics of interest to ATLPUG. Hope to see y'all there! :)