Jeff's slides may be back soon ;)

Jeff Davis will present "scaling streaming databases" at next week's SFPUG meeting in downtown San Francisco:

Tuesday, September 9
7:30pm
MyNewPlace
425 Bush Street, Suite 200
San Francisco, CA 94108

RSVP via meetup or on the sfpug@postgresql.org mailing list if you want food/drinks!

What:

Jeff Davis presents: Scaling Streaming Databases.

When:

Tuesday, September 9, 7:30pm.

Where:

MyNewPlace
425 Bush Street, Suite 200
San Francisco, CA 94108

RSVP:

ASAP at http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/8469348/, or, if you insist on making things difficult for the organizers, to david@fetter.org.

The program for pgDay LinuxWorldExpo is now up. Please register with LinuxWorld as soon as possible!

PostgreSQL Community Day Schedule

Tuesday, August 5th

Please register with LinuxWorldExpo

The PostgreSQL Community Day is sponsored by CommandPrompt and EnterpriseDB.

Sessions

PostgreSQL's Future original PostgreSQL Core Team member and EnterpriseDB chief architect Bruce Momijian talks about where PostgreSQL has been over its 12-year history as an open source project, and where he thinks the project is going in the future.

The Business Case for PostgreSQL Commercial adoption and deployment of PostgreSQL is accelerating. Jim Mlodgenski, vice president of technical services for EnterpriseDB, explores the business reasons behind this increasing popularity, and makes the case that this adoption will accelerate even further, as it addresses the growing gap between expensive, proprietary databases and free, lighter-weight products. Among PostgreSQL's advantages are the favorable BSD license, the community commitment to quality, user influenced features, and increasing commercial support.

Up and Running With PostgreSQL in 30 Minutes Because it is so powerful and comes with 2000 pages of documentation, PostgreSQL has the undeserved reputation of being complex, obscure, and difficult to install. Long-time contributor David Fetter and Core Team member Josh Berkus will show you how easy it is to be up, running, and developing with PostgreSQL ... in less than 30 minutes.

PostgreSQL, Extensible to the Nth Degree: Functions, Languages, Types, Rules, Performance, and More! PostgreSQL hacker and Truviso senior engineer Jeff Davis will show how the extensible pieces of PostgreSQL fit together to give you the full power of native functionality -- including performance. These pieces, when combined, make PostgreSQL able to do almost anything you can imagine. A variety add-ons have been very successful in PostgreSQL merely by using this extensibility. Examples in this talk will range from PostGIS (a GIS extension for PostgreSQL) to DBI-Link (manage any data source accessible via perl DBI).

Lightning Talks Six hackers, application developers, driver maintainers, PostgreSQL extension creators and more will talk for 5 minutes each about their projects and products. Learn about the great variety of things people are doing with this advanced database system, including Unicluster, building javadocs with PostgreSQL, database security, and more.

High Availability PostgreSQL using UCARP, DRBD, and Warm Standby Having trouble crafting a high-availability solution without excessive performace costs? Then this is the solution for you. In this session we will discuss and implement the Userland Implementation of the Common Address Redundancy Protocol (UCARP) along with PostgreSQL's "warm standby" feature and Distributed Replicated Block Devices (DRBD) to provide rapid recovery from database failures while still retaining the ACID "durability" constraint.

Using PostGIS to add some spatial flavor to your applications With the advent of neogeography everyone wants to do something spatial with their applications. In this session, Steve Citron-Pousty, Developer Evangelist for deCarta, will give an introduction to PostGIS (a spatial extension for PostreSQL) and then show you how to get some cool mapping magic going. We make sure your PostGIS install is working, download some data from the internet, load it into PostGIS, and then start asking some interesting spatial questions of the data. We will look at queries calculate distance and area, calculate centroids, test distance or containment, and we will clip features to a bounding box. Demos and code will be shown for using these functions in desktop applications and in custom applications.

Using Python with PostgreSQL Python hacker John Zarella tells you how Python and PostgreSQL make an unbeatable combination of processing power and persistent data storage. The Python language provides superior expressive power for solving problems in very diverse fields -- from web services to numerical analysis. PostgreSQL supplies a high-integrity, reliable database that ensures continuous availability of the information you need to solve those problems.

PostgreSQL Party After the pgDay, join us at a bar and grill near Moscone Center to play pool against other PostgreSQL geeks! Pick up your invitation at the pgDay; attendence is limited. Finger food and beer provided by our party sponsors: Truviso, CommandPrompt, EnterpriseDB, iParadigms, Open Technology Group, and xTuple.

Next Tuesday, July 8th, the PostgreSQL Project will be 12 years old!

Come celebrate one of the oldest and most successful open source projects with us. Our schedule will be:

* 7:00-7:30: Meet and plan the LinuxWorld pgDay (plus snacks)
* 7:30-8:00: PostgreSQL Development 2.0 -- David Fetter
* 8-ish: proceed down to 21st Amendment for food & beer to celebrate the Elephant's 12th birthday!

Exact location is TBA, but it will be somewhere Downtown San Francisco. Expect a final location next week. Come raise a glass with us!

RSVP and get final details on Meetup

Two (maybe three) great PostgreSQL social events. One great sponsorship opportunity!

We will be having social events at major open source conferences this year:

• O'Reilly Open Source Conference, Portland, Oregon, Sunday July 20th(1)
• LinuxWorldExpo, San Francisco, Tuesday August 5th(2)
• Maybe more (see below)

In order to "spread the love" of PostgreSQL around the Open Source community (and encourage PostgreSQL adoption!), we'd like to spend a total of $5000 to $6000 on both events, and of course can use more.

These will be larger, more public events than last year. We are expecting up to 120 people at each, including PostgreSQL hackers, web developers, IT company management, and open source luminaries. And, of course, you!

As such, I'm looking for sponsors. Here's how it works:

$500: Single-Party Sponsor: signage at entrance to *one* of the two events. Right to make one "we're hiring" announcement, and to distribute 1 piece of company literature during the pgDay. Invitations for your booth staff.

$1000: as $500, but for both events.

$2000: as $1000, with bigger logo. Plus: thank-you in the pgDay keynote, 6 reserved(2) invitatons for each event to give to customers/partners, and your name on the invitation.

$3000: as $2000, with bigger / more prominent logo. Plus: mention on all further announcements, special blog entry thanking you, and 12 reserved(3) invitations for customers/partners.

But wait, there's *more*! If we raise enough for the OSCON and LinuxWorldExpo social events, we will also have a social event at LISA USENIX conference in San Diego(4) this November. Sponsors will be featured there as well. Don't miss your chance at this opportunity ... respond now and we'll throw in a complete set of Ginzu knives(5)!

Please contact Josh Berkus (josh@postgresql.org) for further information. Due to agreement with both conferences, this will be the only sponsorship opportunity for OSCON and LWE. Any leftover funds from the events will go to the PostgreSQL fund at SPI, inc. Please contact me before June 25th regarding your interest in sponsoring. Sponsorships must be paid by August 15th.

There will be separate sponsorship calls for the PostgreSQL West and PostgreSQL East 1-day conferences, starting in October. Also, we are asking for existing project sponsors to send us 1-page flyers for the PostgreSQL Products folders.

Josh Berkus
Selena Deckelmann
PostgreSQL Project

(1)http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008
(2)http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/live/12/ehall//SN460564
(3) These will be public events, and we will be handing out a limited number of invitations to conference attendees. The reserved invitations simply make sure that your guests get in to the event.
(4)http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa08/
(5) No, not really. We will give you some nice stickers, though.

Where: Linux World Expo, Moscone Center, San Francisco
When: Tuesday August 5th, from 9am to 5pm
What: Talks for a mixed audience of community & newbies
Deadline: June 17th
Who: You!

The San Francisco PostgreSQL Users' Group will be running a full day of
PostgreSQL sessions at LinuxWorldExpo 2008 in San Francisco. This will be
alongside the regular LinuxWorld sessions, and advertised by LinuxWorld.
Which means you can expect dozens of people new to PostgreSQL as well as
the members of SFPUG.

Which means we need you to submit a proposal *right now* for your talk at
this pgDay. We need several regular 1-hour talks, Lightning Talks (5
minutes) and a single 2-hour tutorial. Submit though the PUGS site:

1. Create your PUGS login
2. Then submit a talk

Details: talks should be aimed at a general audience, except for lightning
talks, which can be about anything PostgreSQL-related. We have no money
for travel sponsorships, but you will get free drinks. Acceptances will
be mailed by June 25th. We just need a 5-line abstract right now; you can
send slides later. Contact josh@postgreSQL.org if you have questions.

Date: Wednesday, June 11th
Time: 7:30 PM
Food: TBA
Directons to Casa Donde

pgCon Report

Josh Berkus and David Fetter will give a recap of what happened at pgCon for those who missed it, as well as discuss the fallout from that conference, including replication in the core, commitfests, and more. Plus slides!

An Introduction to Parsing

No matter what language you use to write software --
from Basic and C to Java, Python, Perl and SQL -- a
parser is part of the behind-the-scenes machinery. The
parser is an essential part of translating what you
write into something that can be executed. It analyzes
your code and breaks it down into contants, variables,
statements, expressions, punctuation, etc.

We'll talk about what parsing is, how a parser works,
how parsing integrates with semantic analysis, and
discuss some different types of parsers and
compiler-compilers. We'll finish with a very brief
look at the PostgreSQL parser.