Meeting recap!

John Naylor entertained a packed room at FreeGeek with stories from his time as a data manager with the Obama campaign. Especially interesting to me was the way he pulled together and verified voter data from a number of sources. I sure wish I'd known about the Geo::StreetAddress::US Perl module before I completed a similar project (albeit on a much smaller scale - several orders of magnitude smaller) for a local organization.

Also: we had bacon. And donuts.

See you next month for "The Drama of a Fully Versioned Database in MySQL" with Ben Hengst.

John Naylor will be talking about his experience in Florida as a data manager for President Obama's 2008 campaign. He will discuss the role of data in political campaigns, and also refactor some data warehouse queries. Donuts and bacon provided.

Refreshments will be partaken at the Lucky Labrador Pub in SE Portland afterward. PDX.pm Hackathon crashing will ensue.

The intro question of the night was "what is your favorite cupcake flavor?" The majority of answers were chocolate with blue frosting and sprinkles, which Dan Colish brought that night. Dan tried to distract us by talking about materialized views while people were munching on cupcakes. He successfully gathered people's attention by talking about materialized view's benefits for decision support, OLAP, replication, load balancing, and controlling data access.

Reminder: There will be no meeting in Decembers, but everyone is invited to the Winter Coders' Social Tuesday, December 8, 2009 from 6–11pm at NedSpace Old Town. Details for signing up are here: http://calagator.org/events/1250457765

Where: FreeGeek
When: 7pm 19 Nov, 2009

Dan Colish will be talking about materialized views. And bringing cupcakes. And he'll be talking about relational algebra, and we know what that means. :D Afterwards, we will be crashing the pdx.pm hackathon at the Lucky Lab, and stealing their beer.

See you there!

gabrielle

Where: FreeGeek
When: 7pm
Who: Selena Deckelmann
Topic: Bucardo: Replication with tiny little goats

Bucardo is a multi-master/master-slave replication system written in Perl that is pretty sweet. It's got a newly-revamped user interface, easy-to-use status indicators, and some cool features that the other major replication systems don't have. With a release-early, release-often philosphy, features are being implemented and improved rapidly. Bucardo is currently deployed at several large ecommerce businesses, and has been a production-ready system for about 4 years. Greg Sabino Mullane is the primary developer, and the engineers working with Bucardo have created a wiki, and are writing up test cases to help new folks get started right now.

Beer/hackathon crashing at the SE Lucky Lab afterwards, as usual.

See you there!

Come on out for the PDXPUG monthly meeting!

Where: FreeGeek http://www.freegeek.org
When: 7pm 17 Sept, 2009
Who: David Wheeler
What: Unit Test Your Database!

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Talk description:

Given that the database, as the canonical repository of data, is the most important part of many applications, why is it that we don't write database unit tests? This talk promotes the practice of implementing tests to directly test the schema, storage, and functionality of databases.

We're all used to unit testing our applications by now. The Extreme and Agile programming movements have done a great deal to promote unit testing, to the extent that many of us are now dependent on tests to assure that our applications work reliably. But how often do we test the database underlying our applications? Given that the database, as the repository for all of the knowledge and data for an application, just might be the single most important part of that application, the time for standardized database unit testing has come.

This talk promotes the practice of writing and running unit tests that directly test the schema, storage, and functionality of application databases. Following a review of the available PostgreSQL unit testing frameworks, we'll review examples of testing tables, views, columns, constraints, indexes, triggers, and functions. The idea is to promote complete test coverage every aspect of a database, independent of application unit tests, to ensure reliably canonical data integrity.

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After David's talk, we'll head to the SE Lucky Lab to crash the PDX.pm weekly hackathon.

See you there!

gabrielle

We totally missed our 3rd anniversary last month! Congrats to everyone for keeping things going over the past few years.

Last night, we heard from Jim Cser about Metro's Economic & Land-use Forecasting. Metro's in charge of the famous Urban Growth Boundary (search www.oregonmetro.gov for "UGB" for more info). We're required by OR law to maintain a 20-year supply of land within the UGB, and the UBG is reviewed every 5 years. "Metroscope" combines land-use & transportation data modeling to create forecasts. The hardest part is taking the forecasting data & turning it into information the city planners & policy makers can actually use. Jim gets to make some really cool maps with it. :) Thanks, Jim!

Then we retired to the pub & crashed the PDX.pm hackathon.

Next meeting, Thurs Sep 17: "Unit Test Your Database" with David Wheeler. It's also getting to be time for our annual Relational Algebra Cocktail Party, so be thinking about what you'd like to learn/teach/drink.

Other announcements:
- PGWest is coming up - Oct 16-18 in Seattle.
- There is an OpenGIS group in Portland - PDX OSGIS google group, check it out.

Where: FreeGeek
When: 7pm 20 August, 2009
Who: Jim Cser
What: Metro simulation database

Drinks afterward at the SE Lucky Lab.

See you there!

gabrielle

PDXPUG's next meeting is this Thursday!

Topic: PostGIS and Census Data
Speaker: Webb Sprague
Location: FreeGeek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR
Date/time: 7/16/09, 7pm

Webb Sprague will be speaking about PostGIS and the Census Data at the next PDXPUG meeting at FreeGeek (at 7:00pm - 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR).

Looking forward to seeing everyone there....and of course, drinks at the Lucky Lab (http://www.luckylab.com/) at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. afterward.

From Webb:
If anyone is wondering about specifics, I will describe how I recently created a "crosswalk" table that correlates census tracts in 1980 with census tracts in 2000 in the Portland region (well, Washington, Multnomah, and Clackamas counties), so that we could see poverty trends over the last 25 years.

I used PostGIS, Census naming conventions ("FIPS codes"), and lots of outer joins. So if you like that sort of thing, I would love to hear your comments tomorrow!

Reporting LIVE from OSBridge...we had the PostgreSQL BOF at the same time as our monthly PDXPUG meeting. 6 regulars, a new person, and a couple of out-of-towners were in attendance. Josh B gave us a quick overview of 8.4. 293 (or 297!) new features. In addition to the big stuff (like windowing functions) there are a ton of little administrative tweaks. I am particularly excited about the new functionality of \df - displays only user-defined fuctions.

Announcements:
PgDay is Saturday Sept 19 in Athens, GA! Make your plans now.

Michael Brewer highly recommends the use of a tuba as a booth prop. Ask him to tell you the story.

Selena & I are working on PostgreSQL equivalents for the queries in Stephan Faroult's _Refactoring SQL Applications_.

I was disappointed to learn that TrustTheVote is running on MySQL. Granted, it's an improvement over current voting software, but maybe we want to talk to them about running on a different, say, more elephantine database?

Future plans:
Josh told us about the patch review process. You don't have to be able to read C! If you can read the spec, apply the patch, verify that it works, proof the docs - you can be a reviewer! All you need to do is write a report. Webb suggested PDXPUG have a patch review party - sounds like a great idea to me!