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.

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!

June's meeting will be at the usual time (7pm), but will be held at OSBridge. BoF format.

http://opensourcebridge.org/sessions/274

(You don't have to be a registered conference attendee for the BoF, so come on out!)

This month, Len Shapiro talked with us about the Intro to Databases class that he teaches at PSU. This class is a requirement for all CS students. Len uses real-life data - a version of the FEC database - to give the students a more realistic experience with how databases function in the real world. The class is taught with PostgreSQL as the DBMS, but students may use a database and scripting language of their choice for their class project, a database-backed web application.

Len takes a different approach by teaching SQL first, then relational algebra. The idea is to mimics the way the DBMS works: it translates SQL into relational algebra. The students work with the same database throughout the class session, adding keys, dealing with NULLs, creating indexes, working with crappy or missing data, troubleshooting slow queries - all problems they might encounter in the real world.

Thanks for the great discussion, Len!

The "secret word" for next month's meeting is: COBOL.

Where: FreeGeek
When: Thurs May 21, 7pm

Beer afterwards at the Lucky Lab (a mere 2-3 blocks away!)

What Len's going to talk about:

I'll survey how I teach the introductory database course at PSU. My goal for the talk is to elicit suggestions for how I could do a better job. The theme of the course is "transforming data into Information". I use a 200 Meg database, hosted on PostgreSQL, instead of the one-slide databases used in typical intro courses, to illustrate the principles of the course. The database is Federal Elections Commission data re donations to candidates, so queries often reflect real questions about the real data.

Bio: Len Shapiro has been a professor at PSU for 23 years. His research interests are primarily in query processing.

We had 20 people at this month's meeting, nearly an SRO crowd!

John won the PUG ticket to Bridge http://opensourcebridge.org/. As usual, Wheeler won the introductions.

Then we were on to our feature presentation: Chris May on the challenges he faced with a very large MySQL database which he interited. (Hint: This isn't something you want Aunt Mabel to leave you in her will.) This was probably the scariest presentation we've had to date. Granted, some of the issues were version-related, and there were some people-handling speedbumps (trust between sysadmins & DBAs, no F2F time, etc.), but overall this presentation just crushed me. For starters, Chris discovered that row-level locking on his version of MySQL was per-server-instance: users of the other database on the same server were locked out when he was working in his sandbox database. Then he had to wait 3 days for a rollback. It's enough to drive one to drink. In fact, I believe I'm going to go pour myself something & let Chris's slides handle the rest of this.