TOPIC: Managing internet services: using the right tool for the job
SPEAKER: Ed Sawicki
WHEN: March 20, 2008, 7pm
WHERE: FreeGeek, 1731 SE 10th Ave, Portland, OR 97214

Also: What the heck is the United States PostgreSQL Association?, Selena Deckelmann

AND: ELEPHANT BUTTONS! courtesy of David Fetter.

Here's what Ed had to say about his presentation:

"I'll probably end up doing live benchmarks, showing code
snippets, and explaining my rationale for why I chose
to do things the way I do."

"My current projects involve managing a variety
of Internet services, such as spam suppression and the
associated per-user black/white list management, DNS record
management, PKI key management, and a variety of others. Some
of these services require that I deal with the storage and
retrieval of both discrete IP addresses and CIDR blocks in
real time.

I've had to decide on data stores that include plain text
files, SQL using SQLite and Postgres, and constant databases
using tinycdb. At every stage of development I've had to
decide which of these was best based on tools available and
performance testing. For example, Postgres has IP and CIDR
data types and adequate facilities to search for IP addresses
within a CIDR block but performance pales in comparison to
simpler tools that use plain text files. As a result, my
applications use various data stores instead of just one."

Refreshment afterward at the Lucky Lab!