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!

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!

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!