http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/HP_ProLiant_DL380_G5_Tuning_Guide

Talks for PDXPUG Day have been announced!

Find the latest information at: http://pugs.postgresql.org/pdxpugday

You can subscribe to changes to talks via the RSS Feed! http://pugs.postgresql.org/view/pdxpugtalksview/feed

We'll be posting here as new information comes up. The after party will be at the Gotham Tavern, right on the MAX yellow line in Portland. If you're staying in a hotel near the convention center, this will be extremely convenient for you.

Looking forward to meeting you all!!

SFPUG PgDay Talk Submission Moderation

PDXPUG PgDay Talk Submission Moderation

PDXPUG PgDay will be on July 20, 2008. This is a one-day conference happening the day before OSCON at the Oregon Convention Center.

Be sure to sign up to attend! Have a look at our schedule, and the full descriptions of talks.

Looking forward to meeting you all!

Topic: The Relational Model
Who: Jeff Davis
Date: 6/19/08, 7pm
Where: FreeGeek, 1731 SE 10th Ave, Portland, OR

Come to our next PostgreSQL Users Group meeting where Jeff Davis will
discuss the finer points of the Relational Model, otherwise known as
the model upon which all major SQL databases systems like Oracle,
MySQL and PostgreSQL are based.

He's fresh off giving a talk about this at PgCon, where it was very
well received!

Here's his abstract from that talk:

"This talk focuses on two common data management tasks, and how the
relational model can help. First, how to answer complex questions
about your data, and provide an answer that can be understood by
non-IT people unambiguously. Second, how to effectively extract
meaning from disorganized (or under-documented) data sets for
effective data migration or reporting.

The relational model, on which all SQL DBMSs are based, is founded on
both logic and sets. Relational operators like JOIN and UNION have a
direct logical meaning, and you can use those operators to answer
complex questions from your data unambiguously. Not only can you
provide unambiguous answers, but you can translate SQL queries into
the language of logic, which can be understood by people outside of
IT.

Equally important is the utility of logic working backwards to help
find meaning in disorganized (or perhaps undocumented) data sets.
Nearly every inherited data set is less than perfectly documented, and
often inconsistent. Changes to (or replacement of) the application
require this data to be migrated. By iteratively making assertions and
then testing them using the rules of logic and the convenience of
sets, you can find exceptions and contradictions that help you refine
the meaning of data, and possibly correct inconsistencies."

Topic: PostgreSQL for Pythoneers
Speaker: Jason Kirtland
Date: Thursday, 5/15/08
Location: FreeGeek, 1731 SE 10th Ave

Come join us for an evening of Pythoneering with Jason Kirtland, a key
force behind the Portland Python Interest Group -
http://wiki.python.org/moin/PortlandPythonUserGroup. They are having
Lightning Talks tomorrow night at Cubespace.

Jason hasn't provided too many details at this point, but I imagine it
will be a tour of a popular Python ORM and a discussion of using it
with PostgreSQL.

"A tour of SQLAlchemy [1], an open source database toolkit and object relational mapper in Python. The tour will be SQL heavy and Python-light, and I'm planning on focusing on the object relational mapping part of the tool.

If you have a schema that you'd like to see mapped, send it my way and I'll do my best to work it in to the presentation.

[1] http://www.sqlalchemy.org/"

Also, Jason has offered to map RT - a continuation of our refactored schema meeting for RT.

Refreshments afterward at the Lucky Lab!

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.

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.

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"

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See you there!