PUGs Recent Changes Feed

March meeting

gabrielle — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:27:51 +0000

Next Thursday, for our regularly scheduled meeting, we will be having a 9.0 alpha testing party! When: 7 pm, Thursday, March 19, 2010 Where: FreeGeek Who: YOU! If you want to test it on your own machine, please download it ahead of time: http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/9.0alpha4/ If you want to work on one of the P4 Lab machines, contact Mark so he can get an account set up for you. Read: http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/HowToBetaTest http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/release-9-0.html You don't need a laptop to participate - we can do pair-agile-eXtreme testing! Afterwards, as usual, we will have beer/crash the PDX.pm Hackathon at the Lucky Lab.

Seapug (March) - Data Acquisition & Data Destruction

lalbin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:08:24 +0000

Welcome to the Seattle Postgres Users Group (SEAPUG) On March 9th at 7PM, Robert Emin will be doing a talk on real time data acquisition using National Instruments LabView and writing the sensor data directly into a PostgreSQL database. Afterword's, I will do a presentation on Data Destruction and how some of the current methods are becoming less effective as the size of the drive increase, plus some new methods that are built into the drive that you may not know about. We meet the second Tuesday of the month at 7PM at Statistical Center for HIV/AIDS Research and Prevention (SCHARP) Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) 1616 Eastlake Ave N. Seattle, WA 98102 Please arrive between 6:30 & 7:00 PM, so that we can easily accommodate you, because: 1) The parking garage automatically closes at 7 PM (free guest parking) 2) This is a secure building, everyone will meet in the lobby (and get a which chance to chat with each other) and then we will escort everyone to the conference room. 3) If you do arrive late, have the guard call the conference room, so that we can send someone down to get you. This will get much easier and smoother after the first few meetings. If you are going to be attending please post on the seapug@postgresql.org list or send me a direct email at lalbin@scharp.org I need to confirmation so that I know if we need to wait for someone else to arrive before we start the presentation. Afterword's we will be going to Feierabend (German Pub) for a bite to eat / drink and a change to get to know each other. Lloyd

JNBPUG is meeting in March

thebellhead — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:07:53 +0000

I have pieced my willingness to organise back together after last year's less than successful attempts to get a PUG meeting together. JNBPUG will be meeting on Monday the 15th of March, and we actually have some confirmed attendees this time. For those who are puzzled by the name it comes from the airport code for OR Tambo, This is not all about Jo'burg - GAU belongs to Bhorjar in India, which will one day hopefully have its own PUG. Provisional venue for the meeting is the Wits Business School on St Andrews Rd in Parktown. A map is available from their website. Starting time is TBD, depending mainly on whether there are any Pretoria based people who want to attend, There will be a presentation on partitioning, and an opportunity to find out what other people are doing with Postgres. If you're interested please join the mailing list and say so - and get updates on times and access control at the campus.

February Meeting 2/18/2010: Over Normalization from a developers point of view

markwkm — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:15:08 +0000

Ben Hengst will be speaking at the next PDXPUG meeting at FreeGeek (at 7:00pm - 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR). ----- Ben Hengst works for Powells.com and has been involved in some in house restructuring, mostly centered around moving to a very vertical structure. This talk will revolve around what works and what doesn't, code and people problems that have been encountered and how to dig your self out. Looking forward to seeing everyone there....and of course, drinks at the Lucky Lab (http://www.luckylab.com/ ) at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. afterwards.

February AustinPUG meeting

decibel — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:26:54 +0000

TOMORROW! Wednesday Feb 10th, 7PM at Sun. I'll be presenting on all the new stuff in Postgres 9.0. RSVP to austinpug@postgresql.org appreciated.

Start of the Seattle Postgres Users Group (Seapug)

lalbin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 06:58:46 +0000

Welcome to the new Seattle Postgres Users Group (SEAPUG) We will be meeting the second Tuesday of the month at 7PM at Statistical Center for HIV/AIDS Research and Prevention (SCHARP) Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) 1616 Eastlake Ave N. Seattle, WA 98102 We would like to welcome Josh Drake of Command Prompt as our first presenter. On February 9th at 7PM, Josh Drake will be doing a talk on PostgreSQL Performance. Please arrive early, so that we can easily accommodate you, because: 1) The parking garage automatically closes at 7pm (free guest parking) 2) This is a secure building and we have to meet you in the lobby and escort you to the conference room. 3) If you do arrive late, have the guard call the conference room, so that we can send someone down to get you. This will get much easier and smoother after the first few meetings. If you are going to be attending please post on the seapug@postgresql.org list or send me an email at lalbin@scharp.org This will help make these first few meeting run smoother. There are several local pubs nearby to chat at afterwards. I will have one of our group pick out a good one. Lloyd

SCALE 8X - Bird Of A Feather

lapug — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:13:00 +0000

Josh Berkus will deliver a presentation on PostgreSQL Version 9.0 during the Birds of a Feather” session at SCALE. This is an excellent opportunity to learn about the exciting new features that are included in this new release and to meet other PostgreSQL users local to the Los Angeles area.

EVENT: 2010 SCALE 8X

LOCATION: Westin Hotel

Room: La Guardia

Time: 7:00 pm, Saturday February 20th

Inquiries for additional information can be sent to lapug@postgresql.org.

January Meeting recap

gabrielle — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 00:30:02 +0000

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.

LAPUG January Meeting

lapug — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:26:20 +0000

Topic for Consideration: Alan Gruskoff will present the use of Adobe Flex/ PHP-AMF using PostgreSQL. Time: January 27, 7:30-9:00 pm (Wednesday Evening) Location: Vote for your favorite meeting Location Caltech Steele 214 in Caltech. 370 South Holliston Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91106 Map: Map to Caltech Campus Map [About LAPUG] [Join the Mailing List] [View List Archive]

January Meeting: OBAMA!

gabrielle — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:28:39 +0000

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.

AustinPUG meeting, WEDNESDAY Dec. 9th

decibel — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:08:00 +0000

We'll be meeting Wednesday, Dec 9th, 7PM at Sun. I will be presenting on how we use table inheritance for what it was actually meant for and not just partitioning. Please RSVP to the mailing list so that we can get a count for Pizza! Sun Microsystems Building 8 - Longhorn Conference Room 5300 Riata Park Ct Austin, TX 78727 Map

November 2009 Meeting Recap and December Reminder

markwkm — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:15:15 +0000

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

PDXPUG November meeting!

gabrielle — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:41:25 +0000

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

PDXPUG October Meeting!

gabrielle — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:13:45 +0100

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!

AustinPUG MEETING CANCELLED!

decibel — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:48:59 +0100

Tonights meeting has been canceled due to lack of response.

AustinPUG meeting, Tuesday Oct. 6th!

decibel — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:05:49 +0100

7PM at Sun!

October LAPUG Meeting

lapug — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:57:27 +0100

Topic for Consideration: Jim Mlodgenski from EnterpriseDB will present "Architecting Your PostgreSQL Application for the Cloud." Abstract: The cloud is a powerful environment for deploying applications, but like any type of infrastructure, it has strengths and weaknesses. This session will discuss how to leverage those strengths and mitigate the weaknesses on the data tier of your application. This architectural discussion will focus not only on performance and scalability, but also on security and management within a cloud environment. Time: October 19, 7:30-9:00 pm (Monday Evening) Location: Vote for your favorite meeting Location Caltech Steele 214 in Caltech. 370 South Holliston Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91106 Map: Map to Caltech Campus Map [About LAPUG] [Join the Mailing List] [View List Archive]

September Meeting next week!

gabrielle — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:39:50 +0100

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! -- 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. -- After David's talk, we'll head to the SE Lucky Lab to crash the PDX.pm weekly hackathon. See you there! gabrielle

August meeting recap

gabrielle — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:44:47 +0100

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.

August meeting coming up!

gabrielle — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:12:01 +0100

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

surveying effect of checkpoint_completion_target redux

markwkm — Sat, 23 May 2009 05:28:45 +0100

So previously I attempted to survey the effects of checkpoint_completion_target. As Greg Smith explains, we want to more closely examine the response times rather than the throughput, so lets look at the data. Making tables in this blog is hard, the table tags aren't "redone" well. Sorry, I'm not sure how to make it look better... So just to have some sanity, let's just make sure the throughput numbers aren't out of whack.

checkpoint completion target	throughput (notpm)	length of checkpoint	% of checkpoint_timeout
0.1	14908.38	2:42	4.5%
0.2	14929.24	3:16	5.4%
0.3	13713.73	3:49	6.4%
0.4	14102.67	4:21	7.2%
0.5	15002.47	4:50	8.1%
0.6	14898.07	5:22	8.9%
0.7	14898.82	5:53	9.8%
0.8	14619.40	6:23	10.6%
0.9	14970.14	7:46	12.9%

Don't know what happened when checkpoint_completion_target was set to 0.3. Otherwise there isn't a dramatic change in the throughput. Another piece of data that may be of interest is the percentage of the checkpoint_timeout that the checkpoint actually took place over. So now lets take a look at the 90th percentile response times for each transaction. Greg was pointing out the effects on the maximum response time, but I thought it would be easier to report the 90th percentile response times, which may or may not be more interesting. It was certainly easier to copy. :)

checkpoint completion target	Delivery	New Order	Order Status	Payment	Stock Level
0.1	6.88	6.93	6.78	6.78	6.60
0.2	7.51	7.53	7.35	7.33	7.26
0.3	20.21	20.24	19.96	19.96	19.82
0.4	9.33	9.24	9.10	9.14	8.93
0.5	7.44	7.57	7.26	7.29	7.11
0.6	8.04	8.16	7.97	7.94	7.84
0.7	8.45	8.47	8.29	8.24	8.12
0.8	9.21	9.26	9.03	9.01	8.93
0.9	8.70	8.67	8.50	8.47	8.36

It sort of looks like (except for the 1 obviously bad result) that the 90th percentile of response times are increasing as the checkpoint_completion_target is increased. I'm not sure this is what is expected. Maybe the results are fluctuating too much for this to be useful... Here are the links to the raw data: 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9

July 16, 2009 - PDXPUG meeting: PostGIS and Census Data

selenamarie — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:55:31 +0100

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!

PDXPUG June Meeting

gabrielle — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:03:17 +0100

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!)

OSBridge Pg BOF!

gabrielle — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:31:07 +0100

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!

May meeting recap

gabrielle — Sun, 24 May 2009 02:23:34 +0100

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.

6th PSU Presentation - DBT-2 Tuning - Now Online

markwkm — Mon, 18 May 2009 01:19:49 +0100

The slides from the 6th presentation given at Portland State University on May 14, 2009 are available online. This presentation surveys some tuning parameters used with DBT-2. This concludes the speaker series at this time. It was a blast. Thanks to PSU and everyone for coming!

5th PSU Presentation - DBT-2 Filesystem Characterization - Now Online

markwkm — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 18:41:33 +0100

The slides from the 5th presentation given at Portland State University on April 9, 2009 are available online. One line summary would be that it presents data on various Linux filesystems and hardware RAID configurations in a way that you might want to see if your system behaves the same way.

PDXPUG May meeting: Introductory Database Education at PSU - Len Shapiro

gabrielle — Sat, 16 May 2009 03:29:06 +0100

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.

5th PSU Presentation Video Now Online and Reminder for Next Presentation

markwkm — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:28:00 +0100

The fifth presentation about the Linux filesystems given at Portland State University on April 9, 2009 is now online. The next presentation is Thursday May 14th, at 7pm, and will survey a few PostgreSQL tuning parameters and the effects on an OLTP workload. Thursday, May 14 - 7:00 PM Portland State University, 1900 SW 4th Avenue, Fourth Avenue Building – Room 86-01

4th PSU Presentation Now Online and Reminder for Next Presentation

markwkm — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 17:25:25 +0100

The fourth presentation about the DBT-2 workload details given at Portland State University on March 12, 2009 is now online. It is a live demo of using the DBT2-2 kit and looking at the results generated. The next presentation is Thursday April 9th, at 7pm, and will look at basic Linux i/o performance data including topic such as disk configuration, software and hardware RAID, as well as a few other items. Thursday, April 12 - 7:00 PM Portland State University, 1900 SW 4th Avenue, Fourth Avenue Building – Room 86-01

LAPUG May Meeting

lapug — Mon, 04 May 2009 21:44:23 +0100

strong>Topic for Consideration: For the May's Meeting will be hosting Joshua Drake who is the president of the United States PostgreSQL Association (PgUS). He'll spend some time discussing what PgUS is and what to expect from it. After this Joshua will take any manner of PostgreSQL related questions regarding development, administration, and performance tuning. Time: May 27, 8:00-9:00 pm (Wednesday Evening) Location: Vote for your favorite meeting Location Caltech Steele 214 in Caltech. 370 South Holliston Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91106 Map: Map to Caltech Campus Map April's LAPUG Recap: Moo presented a discussion on CouchDB and Erlang, and raised the issue of problem domains that benefit from non traditional databases required extremely hi concurrency and fault tolerance. I hope to see everyone at the next LAPUG meeting! [About LAPUG] [Join the Mailing List] [View List Archive]

AustinPUG meeting, Tuesday May 5th

decibel — Mon, 04 May 2009 04:45:19 +0100

We'll be meeting May 5th, 7PM at Sun. Please RSVP to the mailing list so that we can get a count for Pizza! Sun Microsystems Building 8 - Longhorn Conference Room 5300 Riata Park Ct Austin, TX 78727 Map

April meeting recap

gabrielle — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:16:40 +0100

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.

PDXPUG April meeting: Tales from the Crater with Chris May

gabrielle — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:25:30 +0100

PDXPUG Where: FreeGeek, 1731 SE 10th When: 16 April 2009, 7pm What: Tales from the Crater: Or how PostgreSQL can solve your MySQL woes Chris will present real-life experiences maintaining a large transaction-based MySQL database and efforts to port the data to PostgreSQL. He'll discuss helpful features in both database solutions and workarounds for those that are missing. Who knows - we may even find some areas PostgreSQL can improve to be more competitive! As always, beer afterwards at the Lucky Lab, 3 blocks away. Who: Chris May I am a database expert for NVIDIA, working in Beaverton. I consult with other programmers to achieve better performance and reliability for internal database-driven tools. I have worked extensively with MS SQL over the last 14 years and to a lesser extent with MySQL and PostgreSQL. I currently maintain a mix of databases using all three solutions. I speak three languages fluently, which has actually helped my ability to learn programming languages (It's all just vocabulary and syntax, after all). It also adds depth to my store of swear words when I debug particularly annoying code. Chris's haiku bio: Cali transplant true lives the life of a true geek make my SQL sing

2nd PSU Presentation Online - DBT-2 Background

markwkm — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:22:44 +0000

The second presentation given at Portland State University on January 8, 2009 is now online, as well as the slides.

1st PSU Presentation Online and Reminder for Next Presentation

markwkm — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 01:42:48 +0000

The first presentation given at Portland State University on January 8, 2009 is now online, as well as the slides. The second presentation will probably be available next week when my quota resets. Also the next presentation will be Thursday. We'll go into the nitty gritty details of the DBT-2 workload: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12 - 7:00 PM PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY, 1900 SW 4th AVENUE, FOURTH AVENUE BUILDING – ROOM 86-01

3rd PSU Presentation Online and Reminder for Next Presentation

markwkm — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 01:35:51 +0000

The third presentation about the DBT-2 workload details given at Portland State University on February 12, 2009 is now online, as well as the slides. The next presentation is Thursday March 12, at 7pm, will be a live demo of the dbt-2 kit. Slides have be prepared early: THURSDAY, MARCH 12 - 7:00 PM PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY, 1900 SW 4th AVENUE, FOURTH AVENUE BUILDING – ROOM 86-01

AustinPUG meeting, Tuesday April 7th

decibel — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:09:14 +0000

We'll be meeting April 7th, 7PM at Sun. Please make sure to RSVP to the mailing list so that we can get a count for Pizza! Note: due to spam issues, I have decommissioned austinpug@decibel.org, so please don't use it. Sun Microsystems Building 8 - Longhorn Conference Room 5300 Riata Park Ct Austin, TX 78727 Map

First Meeting of the Los Angeles PostgreSQL Users Group

lapug — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 02:22:53 +0000

It's finally here! After much planning, discussion, and encouragement, we are happy to announce the first meeting of the Los Angeles PostgreSQL User Group (LAPUG). LAPUG provides a forum for Postgres enthusiasts in or around the greater Los Angeles area to meet others for discussions relating to PostgreSQL. Things to expect:

Meeting Fellow Elephant Lovers.
Seeing ways that PostgreSQL is used for work, in education, or simply for fun.
There will be opportunities for those interested to engage in public speaking.
And when appropriate, a few pints over dinner might be involved. :o)

LAPUG Mailing List: To join the LAPUG mailing list or to view the mailing list archives visit the following link: http://archives.postgresql.org/lapug/ Schedule for the First LAPUG Meeting: See the following link for the time and place for the first LAPUG meeting: http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale6x/conference-info/social-events/birds-of-a-feather/ We look forward to seeing you there! And feel free to invite your friends. Recognizing those that greatly contributed to the founding of LAPUG: It is important to recognize those that played an integral role in helping to get LAPUG off of the ground.

Noel Proffitt: Noel has spent many hours developing the first LAPUG presentation on the topic of temporal databases implemented in PostgreSQL. The work he has done is certainly going to get LAPUG off to a good start.
Selena Deckelmann: Selena is one of the key members of the Portland Oregon PostgreSQL User's Group. Because of the phenomenal success of the Portland PUG and because of her contributions to Postgres advocacy, she was recently nominated to become the PostgreSQL User Group Liaison. Following her lead and the direction that she offers has certainly played an integral role in getting this local chapter of PUG off the ground. And if this wasn't enough, she has also aided all of the PUGs around the world by arranging for PUG web pages and mailing lists.
Joshua D. Drake: Joshua is the PostgreSQL liaison for Software in the Public Interest (SPI) and is a major contributor. It was his encouragement that got the ball rolling for starting LAPUG. In addition to this, he facilitated the arrangement to have the first LAPUG meeting at this year SCALE as part of the Best of Friends (Bof or Birds of a Feather) venue.

Second LAPUG Meeting

lapug — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 18:25:36 +0000

Reflecting of the success of LAPUG's first Meeting at SCALE! After successfully launching LAPUG during the Best of Friends (BOF) at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), we are happy to announce the next LAPUG meeting. Topics for discussion: An official topic for discussion is still up open to anyone that would like offer a presentation on some aspect of PostgreSQL. However, in the time being, let's plan on meeting together for a group discussion on "How we are using PostgreSQL." As an alternative to this topic, feel free to discuss how you have made use of any other "flavors" of Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) or even why you are interested in RDBMS. Time: March 28, 7:00 pm Location: The City of Garden Grove Youth Cafe / IT Training Room (Look for the building labeled "Youth Cafe") 11277 Garden Grove Blvd Garden Grove, CA 92840 Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=11277+Garden+Grove+Blvd,+Garden+Grove,+CA+92843&sll=37.300275,-95.537109&sspn=45.17093,82.265625&ie=UTF8&z=16&iwloc=addr Taking a head count: Feel free to invite anyone that may be interested in coming to a PUG meeting. For those that are planning to attend please send an email to the LAPUG mailing list. (If food can be provided, it will help to know how much to bring.) Next Meeting Location: If anyone else has a facility that can be used for the LAPUG meeting please contact me so the we can make future arrangements! Joining the LAPUG mailing list: For those that haven't joined the mailing list and would like to, please follow the directions in the following link: http://mail.postgresql.org/mj/mj_wwwusr?domain=postgresql.org&func=lists-long-full&extra=lapug Proposals for future meetings: If anyone has ideas for a presentation, please email LAPUG mailing list for discussion. Interest was also expressed to use LAPUG meetings for events other than PostgreSQL presentations. One thought was to offer simple training sessions on how to manage certain PostgreSQL related tasks that have challenged newer users of Postgres. It is expected that there will be greater effort required for this kind of preparation, but if sufficient interested is expressed and if facilities are made available we can certainly entertain ideas for these kinds of meetings. We are looking for to meeting all that can attend.

April's LAPUG Meeting

lapug — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:15:08 +0100

Topic for Consideration: Matthew Wetmore from Secom International, will be hosting April's LAPUG meeting. Rather than attending a discussion, Matthew has prepared the facilities for all of us to get some hands on experience tuning some of the rarely used albeit important tuning parameters of PostgreSQL. This will be an experience that all of us can benefit from! Preparatory Home Work: Everyone that has had an opportunity to administer or create a PostgreSQL server is encouraged to bring their copy of the postgresql.conf file. We would like to center discussions around the changes that were made to this file from the original. Also we would like to discuss the impetus as to why the changes were made in the first place. Also, two weeks (or so) before the LAPUG meeting, submit your postgresql.conf file to the LAPUG mailing list. If time allows, Matthew will drop the conf into a live system to produce daily pg_stats to see if the changes made any notable differences in overall performance prior to the meeting. Time: April 25, 7:00 pm Location: Secom International, Inc 9610 Bellanca, Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90045 Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=9610+Bellanca,+Ave.+Los+Angeles,+CA+90045&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=48.287373,81.738281&ie=UTF8&ll=33.949839,-118.380561&spn=0.012442,0.019956&z=16 Taking a head count: Feel free to invite anyone that may be interested in coming to a PUG meeting. For those that are planning to attend please send an email to the LAPUG mailing list. (If food can be provided, it will help to know how much to bring.) Job Postings: http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/385 March's LAPUG Recap: The LAPUG March meeting evolved in to a "Round Table" discussion. Each person shared very interesting experiences in how PostgreSQL was used in the development and use of sophisticated software applications. Some of these applications were for storing sound files, storing images, and other where developed as engineering tools. The discussion also involved to uses of advanced data models such as: PostgreSQL's GIS extension, Temporal Database design, Generalization Hierarchies, Natural Keys versus Surrogate Keys, useful ways Graph Theory can be implemented into table designs to model network archtechtures. Just from this discussion alone, we have several very interesting topics that could be presented at a future LAPUG meeting. Plans were also hatch to contact local universities and colleges to draw interest from local student and professors. Moo is taking the lead in the month of April to contact local schools in time for April's LAPUG "Hand's On" meeting. Joining the LAPUG mailing list: http://mail.postgresql.org/mj/mj_wwwusr?domain=postgresql.org&func=lists-long-full&extra=lapug LAPUG Meeting Schedule: http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/379

May's LAPUG Meeting

lapug — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:16:09 +0100

Topic for Consideration: May's LAPUG meeting will be held at Cal-Poly Pomona. Keith Larson will be delivering a presentation on implementing non-trivial update-able views in PostgreSQL. Preparatory Home Work: This meeting will be hosted and attended by Cal-Poly Computer Science students. They would like us to give a 2 to 5 minute introduction on why we choose to use PostgreSQL in our profession in place of the other database brands that are available. Time: May 30, 7:00 pm Location: Cal-Poly Pomona - Building 8 Room 4 3801 West Temple Avenue Pomona, CA 91767 Map: Google Map Cal Poly Pomona Map Taking a head count: Feel free to invite anyone that may be interested in coming to a PUG meeting. For those that are planning to attend please send an email to the LAPUG mailing list. (If food can be provided, it will help to know how much to bring.) Job Postings:

April's LAPUG Recap: Matthew with Secom introduced LAPUG to the work of Security, Ticketing, and Financial Transaction equipment. We toured his build seeing the various stages of equipment fabrication, and then made our way to the PostgreSQL area. Seeing software, firmware, and hardware being designed and integrated was a very interesting experience. Our discussion evolved into PostgreSQL's Tuning Parameters. Each of the LAPUGers have tinkered with different parameters. However, it seems that more research can be done to understand how each turning parameter affects PostgreSQL. In regard to each parameter, what tests can be applied to PostgreSQL to determine if the parameter should be adjusted? These are good points for review. Joining the LAPUG mailing list: LAPUG List LAPUG Meeting Schedule: Schedule

June's LAPUG Meeting

lapug — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:52:04 +0100

Topic for Consideration: June's LAPUG meeting will be held at California Institute of Technology. Jaun Jose' Natera will be delivering a presentation on how PL-Perl can be used in PostgreSQL. Time: June 27, 7:00 pm Location: Vote for your meeting Location California Institute of Technology - Steele Building 81 Room 214 391 S Holliston Ave Pasadena, CA 91106 Map: Google Map California Institute of Technology Map Taking a head count: Feel free to invite anyone that may be interested in coming to a PUG meeting. For those that are planning to attend please send an email to the LAPUG mailing list. (If food can be provided, it will help to know how much to bring.) Job Postings:

2008-05-14 Postgres Database Administrator

May's LAPUG Recap: Keith Larson presented non-Trivial Update-able views using the PostgreSQL Rule System. We saw update-able views based not only upon multiple table INNER JOINs but also upon multiple table OUTER JOINs. Next we saw how to create update-able views based upon UNION ALL queries. Lastly, we say the "Big Grand Daddy" of all update-able views: views that were based upon INNER JOIN-ed tables UNION ALL-ed with OUTER JOIN-ed tables. It was amazing to see what Keith was able to accomplish by using the PostgreSQL Rule System. Joining the LAPUG mailing list: LAPUG List LAPUG Meeting Schedule: Schedule

Where's your favorite LAPUG meeting Location

lapug — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:23:47 +0100

It is impressive to see the response of so many locations willing to host LAPUG meetings. If it were up to you, where would you prefer to having the LAPUG meetings? We are not implying only holding meetings is locations that are most popular, but we could have a preference for holding meetings in the most popular locations. So go ahead and vote for where you would like to meet most.

July's LAPUG Meeting

lapug — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:35:30 +0100

Topic for Consideration: July's LAPUG meeting will be held at the City of Garden Grove's City Building 'Housing Authority'. Richard Broersma will be delivering a presentation on "Exploring various data-models for hierarchical data" in PostgreSQL. Time: July 25, 7:00 pm Location: Vote for your meeting Location The City of Garden Grove City Building (Look for the entrance labeled "Housing Authority") 11277 Garden Grove Blvd Garden Grove, CA 92840 Map: Google Map Taking a head count: Feel free to invite anyone that may be interested in coming to a PUG meeting. For those that are planning to attend please send an email to the LAPUG mailing list. (If food can be provided, it will help to know how much to bring.) Job Postings:

May's LAPUG Recap: Jaun Jose' Natera developed a fascinating presentation on Perl and how it can be used as a procedural language in PostgreSQL. The Perl Mongers certainly filled up the seats during the discussion and we were happy to have them. We first started with how to install PL-PERL and then worked our way to Perl's strengths as a application language. In addition to explaining some of the finer points of using "references" in Perl, Jaun demonstrated how immutable, volatile single value and set returning functions can be implemented in Perl.

August's LAPUG Meeting

lapug — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:36:44 +0100

Topic for Consideration: August's LAPUG meeting will be held at the City of Garden Grove's City Building 'Housing Authority'. Geoff Kloess will be delivering a presentation on using "Ruby On Rails" to connect to PostgreSQL. Time: August 29, 7:00 pm Location: Vote for your favorite meeting Location The City of Garden Grove City Building (Look for the entrance labeled "Housing Authority") 11277 Garden Grove Blvd Garden Grove, CA 92840 Map: Google Map Taking a head count: Feel free to invite anyone that may be interested in coming to a PUG meeting. For those that are planning to attend please send an email to the LAPUG mailing list. (If food can be provided, it will help to know how much to bring.) Job Postings:

July's LAPUG Recap: Richard Broersma developed a presentation that explored the Generalization Hierarchy and various ways it could be implemented into PostgreSQL. We learned that there are two requirements for needing to store hierarchical data. One reason is that specific and unique classifications are required to be stored or relationships between sub-class types are required. We saw five ways that hierarchical data could be implemented and we then explored the functional trade-offs that each method had. For further information see the attached presentation. [About LAPUG] [Join the Mailing List] [View List Archive]

LAPUG - September Meeting

lapug — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:03:18 +0100

*********************** ** Attention All LAPUGers ** *********************** Vote for your favorite meeting nights. Vote for your least favorite meeting nights. Topic for Consideration: September's LAPUG meeting will be held in the City of Irwindale. Michael J. Chen will be delivering a presentation on using and configuring SLONY as a means of replicating PostgreSQL. Time: September 26, 7:00 pm Location: Vote for your favorite meeting Location 5288 Rivergrade Rd. Irwindale, CA 91706 Map: Map to Irwindale Taking a head count: Feel free to invite anyone that may be interested in coming to a PUG meeting. For those that are planning to attend please send an email to the LAPUG mailing list. (If food can be provided, it will help to know how much to bring.) August's LAPUG Recap: Geoff Kloess delivered an interesting presentation of Ruby on Rails (RoR). After explaining the syntax semantics of Ruby, Geoff illustrated the Object Relational Mapping that the RoR framework uses and how it is implemented in both the PostgreSQL schema design and RoR class design. Lastly, we watched as Geoff built a simple yet functional website in just a matter of a few of minutes. For further information see the attached presentation. [About LAPUG] [Join the Mailing List] [View List Archive]

LAPUG hosting Greenplum

lapug — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:23:43 +0100

Topic for Consideration: November's LAPUG meeting will be held at Caltech in the City of Pasadena. Paul Salazar the VP of Corporate Marketing at Greenplum Inc. will be delivering a presentation on the basics of Data Warehousing, On-Line Analytic Processing (OLAP) and how the Greenplum Database server supports these application domains. Paul would like additional feedback on points for discussion. So if anyone would like specific features addressed in the meeting regarding Data Warehousing, OLAP, or Greenplum, please email these points to the LAPUG mailing list or post a comment to this blog. Time: November 19, 7:00 pm (Wednesday Evening) Location: Vote for your favorite meeting Location Steele 214 in Caltech. 370 South Holliston Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91106 Map: Map to Caltech Campus Map Taking a head count: Feel free to invite anyone that may be interested in coming to a PUG meeting. For those that are planning to attend please send an email to the LAPUG mailing list. (If food can be provided, it will help to know how much to bring.) September's LAPUG Recap: Michael Chen delivered an excellent presentation for the basics of implementing Slony. Michael pointed out that while Slony is a very powerful replication strategy, it also has a steep learning curve. One of the first recommendations was not to follow the slony tutorial in its recommended setup. It seems that the tutorial demonstrates replication between two PostgreSQL instances running on the same server. While this eases the learning curve by focusing only on learning the Slony interface, it shields the user from pitfalls that will be encountered when configuring two separate servers to communicate successfully with one another. Another point made was need for the user to develop his or her own api layer on top of SLONY that simplifies many low level tasks that Slony exposes. The api layer will be dependent upon the replication topology that is designed by the user, On a side note, I have to mention that I am continually impressed by the immense skill, knowledge, talent, and intelligence that seem to be common with the PostgreSQL users that find their way to various LAPUG meetings. Maybe every users group leader feelings this way, but I can't help but feel that there must be something special about PostgreSQL that attracts people of this caliber. It reminds me of a movie I once saw with the line: "If you build it. They will come!" :) Anyway I hope to see everyone at the next LAPUG meeting! For further information see the attached presentation. {Hold For Presentation} [About LAPUG] [Join the Mailing List] [View List Archive]

LAPUG - February at SCALE

lapug — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:57:20 +0000

Topic for Consideration: This February, LAPUG will be having a "Birds of a Feather" (BOF) meeting at this year's Southern California Linux Exposition (SCALE). The PostgreSQL Users Group Liaison Selena Deckelmann and the PostgreSQL Core Developer Josh Berkus will be presenting a "Tag-Team" presentation regarding some of PostgreSQL's new features released in version 8.4 as well as other key feature from previous versions. Time: February 21, 7-8 pm (Saturday Evening) Location: Vote for your favorite meeting Location Los Angeles Airport Westin 5400 West Century Boulevard Los Angeles, California 90045 Phone: (310) 216-5858 Fax: (310) 417-4545 Map: Map to Airport Westin January's LAPUG Recap:{See Attachments Below} Richard Broersma presented a topic on Tree models in SQL. He mentioned how Trees are a specialized form of graph. It seems that there are three ways to model trees and that PostgreSQL V8.4 will greatly simplify the use of one of these models. Juan Natera presented the Perl ORM module 'ROSE'. It was very interesting to see how ROSE's ORM framework simplifies the task of handling the ties between application logic and Database persistence. This was a very popular talk as seen from the lively Q&A session that ensued. Konstantin Antselovich presented the a Data Model to handle the common functionality of a message board system or mailbox. The discussion that followed was a consideration of the features gained by using an SQL back-end versus a file system back-end. Brian Dolan was the concluding speaker. He presented a fascination discussion that gave an insight into how advanced analytic mathematics can be use to greatly reduce the CPU and Filesystem load on the Database Server(s). To summarize what Brian presented, Likelihood mathematics were used to aggregate many-many-many... billions of rows of data into a materialized view with a row count in the hundreds of thousands that could be SELECT-ed with ordinary SQL to produce insightful yet performant results. (I have to say that this was an awesome topic!) I hope to see everyone at the next LAPUG meeting! [About LAPUG] [Join the Mailing List] [View List Archive]

LAPUG - January's Lightning Talks

lapug — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:33:27 +0000

Topic for Consideration: January's LAPUG meeting will be held at the Fox Media Building in the City of Santa Monica. This month we are planning a round of lightning talks and are looking for speakers to talk about anything that's RDBMS related for about 5 to 10 minutes. We already have some speakers scheduled, so take this opportunity to to sign-up and tell us about what interests you! I wanted to thank everyone that has offer to present at January's meeting. The following is a list of speakers and topics: Konstantin Antselovich - Modelling Message Boards and Mailboxes in SQL Richard Broersma - Modelling Trees in SQL Brian Dolan - Likelihood Models in the Data Warehouse Juan Jose Natera - ORM with Rose::DB::Object Time: January 21, 7:30 pm (Wednesday Evening) Location: Vote for your favorite meeting Location Fox Media Building. 2500 Broadway, Santa Monica, CA 90404 Map: Map to Fox Media Instructions: Fox Interactive Media is located on the second floor of 2500 Broadway, Santa Monica, CA 90404. Fox shares a complex with Yahoo and are in the exact same building as HBO. Fox is along the Broadway edge, closest to the tennis courts. If entering from the street (where you should be able to find plenty of parking) you want to head toward the north-east most building near the tennis courts. After 7pm, the elevator requires a pass. Noelle Sio and David Hubbard from Fox Interactive will be helping us get people up and down. We'll be in or near the meeting room from 6pm onwards. The actual meeting room is directly above the lobby. We can easily see you if you stand outside and wave. Once we stop laughing at your unfortunate fate, we'll come down and let you in. You should park on the street. The pay lot closes at 7 and I haven't set up validations. See you there! Taking a head count: Feel free to invite anyone that may be interested in coming to a PUG meeting. For those that are planning to attend please send an email to the LAPUG mailing list. (If food can be provided, it will help to know how much to bring.) November's LAPUG Recap: Paul Salazar presented a discussion on Greenplum; what features it has and how it compares to its competitors. In addition to this, the presentation touched lightly on some concepts of data warehousing. He gave away some nice swag (including an IPod) at the end which was very nice of him! I hope to see everyone at the next LAPUG meeting! [About LAPUG] [Join the Mailing List] [View List Archive]

Last night's PDXPUG meeting - Extreme Database Makeover!

selenamarie — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 22:47:55 +0000

Here are my rough notes from the meeting. Thanks a ton to Kristin for giving a great talk! Thanks also to Gabrielle for providing gin & tonics. Professor Kristin Tufte, Portland State University Portal dataset http://portal.its.pdx.edu * Only realtime data - Loop Detector Data ** 20 s count, per lane, # of vehicles average ** happy if 40% of the data is fine * Crash data in portland metro since 1999 * Bus data (not in realtime) ** every time they stop, they record how many ppl got on/got off, door open, lift go up/down ** made a speed map for portland * FOCUSING ON Loop detector data ** student looked at the car data in portal, and analyze what the estimated emissions are ** proposal is to look at what the emissions were and create some "green" metrics based on the collected data * INTERESTING METRIC: ** Estimated 137k hours in the car in one day ** Estimated 7million miles on oregon roads * Speed contour plot ** 20k reported incidents per year ** Website -- Portlan website -- portal: portland oregon regional transportation archive listing * Data being grabbed: * 5-minute - every 5 minutes, rolled up * 15-minute and 1hr - every night (but moving to every 15 minutes) * GOALS: ** store the data ** show the pretty pictures *** researchers want the raw data, but they can probably wait a little while to get it * 20 second data: ** 1 table per day: *** monthly view - union of all daily tables *** 2.8 million tables in each table ** 4 billion tuples total, 5-minute aggregation; 1-table/month - 6 million tuples * QUERIES ** Lotsa JOINs, reducing the # of EXTRACTs (better performance) ** Lots of SELECT * from today's data * Misc comments: ** parameterized queries can't use partial indexes * Dual path SaS ** Linux multipath -- active/passive ** can't get dual channel active/active EPQA - sourceforge.net/projects/epqa/ * RECOMMENDATIONS: ** Upgrade to 8.3 ** fio test on local disks and SAN and find out if there's a contention, as its a shared SAN with RAID5, Get access to SAN stats to review ** Reindex on a weekly basis ** Review postgresql.conf settings - increase shared buffers to ~4GB ** Check out this blog post from Josh Berkus: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/database-soup/how-do-i-examine-the-linux-page-cache-30538?rss=1

March Meeting 3/19/2009 - eXtreme Database Makeover ep. 2 - PORTAL

markwkm — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 02:09:18 +0000

Kristin Tufte will be speaking at the next PDXPUG meeting at FreeGeek (at 7:00pm - 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR). ----- PORTAL is a 900 GB PostgreSQL archive of transportation-related data. Data in portal includes: freeway speed and volume data (received in real-time from the Oregon Department of Transportation), weather data, bus data, accident data, and more. The PORTAL schema was developed years ago and needs to be revamped. Further, PORTAL has performance problems likely caused partly by the fact that it lives on a shared SAN. For this meeting, I.ll show the PORTAL schema as it is now and then we can have some fun tearing it apart and figuring out how it could be Looking forward to seeing everyone there....and of course, drinks at the Lucky Lab (http://www.luckylab.com/ ) at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. afterwards.

LAPUG March Meeting

lapug — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:10:35 +0000

Topic for Consideration: For the March Meeting, Moo Moragraan is presenting the topic of Erlang and CouchDB. Erlang is a functional programming language emphasized on concurrency in a distributed system, fault tolerance, and constant availability. These are all ideal for where databases are going. He will demonstrate a little bit on the language's power and then will look into an application of the language in the database world using CouchDB. Time: March 25, 7:30-8:30 pm (Wednesday Evening) Location: Vote for your favorite meeting Location The City of Garden Grove City Building (Look for the entrance labeled "Housing Authority") 11277 Garden Grove Blvd Garden Grove, CA 92840 Map: Google Map February's LAPUG Recap: Selena Deckelmann and Josh Berkus presented many new features that will be introduced in version 8.4. Selena started with a round-table introduction, which was a nice start since many of the persons that attended the BOF were first time attenders. Josh elaborated on many of the features that will standout for PostgreSQL users upgrading to 8.4. Afterwards, we finished up with dinner and drinks at the LAPUG social. On a side note, I wanted to mention the altruism shown by both Selena and Josh. Selena and Josh (as well as many others in the PostgreSQL community) have a long standing track record of supporting the PostgreSQL project and community as was apparent at this year's SCALE. Its important to remember that the support these individuals offer is possible because of the personal sacrifices they make in their time, money, and energy. Its interesting to see the increase in the number of people using PostgreSQL in comparison to the previous SCALES. This shows that the hard work of persons like Josh and Selena is paying off. Also, in addition to Josh and Selena I wanted to mention the other volunteers that helped out at the PostgreSQL booth. They were Christopher Nielson, Erez Ascher, John Zarrella, Noel Proffitt, and Moo Moragraan. I hope to see everyone at the next LAPUG meeting! [About LAPUG] [Join the Mailing List] [View List Archive]

3rd PSU Presentation - DBT-2 Howto

markwkm — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:18:26 +0000

This is a reminder that the 3rd presentation about DBT-2 performance at Portland State University will be next week, Thursday March 12th, 2009. This presentation will be a live demo on how to use the kit to test your system and product a report or results. This is a live demo so slides will be shown. But I will provide some slides now to outline some of the things covered in this kit. People who are able to attend may wish to download and print out a set for notes. (See embedded links for viewing the slides online and downloading the slides.)

AustinPUG meeting, Tuesday March 10th

decibel — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:59:26 +0000

We'll be meeting March 10th, 7PM at Sun. Meeting topic will be performance tuning. Please make sure to RSVP to the mailing list so that we can get a count for Pizza! Note: due to spam issues, I have decommissioned austinpug@decibel.org, so please don't use it. Sun Microsystems Building 8 - Longhorn Conference Room 5300 Riata Park Ct Austin, TX 78727 Map

SydPUG meeting recap 3rd February 2009

ccd — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 05:56:57 +0000

A rather late recap of the last SydPUG meeting: Mark Leslie, software architect with LISAsoft, gave a very informative presentation on the history and capabilities of PostGIS. A lively question and answer session ensued. Mark's slides from the meeting are attached. Thanks very much to everyone who came to the meeting. Speakers have been enlisted for the next SydPUG, which is (at this time) scheduled to run in early April. Charles

surverying effect of checkpoint_completion_target

markwkm — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Catching up on presenting some data (you can see these were run earlier in the month) about the effects of the checkpoint_completion_target: checkpoint_completion_target: notpm .6: 8955.68 .7: 9041.58 .8: 8912.40 .9: 9014.41 Changing the checkpoint_completion_target doesn't seem to be significant, but I'm am wondering if any checkpoint tuning parameters will be significant while the transaction logs remain on the same devices at the rest of the database. We will be testing that soon...

PDXPUG: Last night's meeting

gabrielle — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:24:41 +0000

Last night, Ed Borasky shared recent data from tests he's run with iostat and blktrace. Throughput seemed really low on the random read/writes, but may have been not too much out of line with what we've seen in P5. Ed also shared some gotchas, e.g. the sysstat scheduler is in GMT by default, iostat isn't too smart about wrapping past midnight (so if you write a parser for iostat, keep that in mind), and blktrace includes its own ops in its analysis (so plan for that!) seekwatcher will create graphics and movies of the output of blktrace - pretty cool, but needs a soundtrack IMO. ;) We contemplated having a live-action demo of "seek" but headed to the Lab instead for more lively conversation. Thanks, Ed! (I'll post a link to his slides as soon as I have it!)

I guess I'm "it".

gabrielle — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:11:37 +0000

I was tagged by Selena. Here goes: 1. (Since this is the one I get asked about most) Yes, I really do make most of my own clothes, and I usually mod those that I do purchase. I've been working with needle & thread in some form or fashion since I was very young. 2. I love my job. I get to work with smart, fun (& funny) people and solve puzzles every day. How awesome is that? 3. A long time ago, I was kicked out of a mall for wearing a trench coat. 4. In a related vein, I was mentioned by name in the "Dress Code" section of the Employee Handbook shortly after I left my second job. (It was my hair.) 5. I like millipedes, but centipedes give me the willies. 6. I have pretty good luck with vehicles - I've been pulled over at least 5 times; miraculously, I have yet to receive an actual ticket. :knock wood: I've also been in 8 accidents, some of which were pretty serious, and have walked away with only minor scratches from all of them. 7. When I was 14 my uncle bet me a quarter that I would be drinking coffee by the time I was 18 (I think). I collected when I was 22 or so, and still have the quarter ;). I also still don't drink coffee. -- I will tag...Mark.

LAPUG - PreSCALE Pizza Party

lapug — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:43:32 +0000

Folder Stuffing Pizza Party: This Friday (Feb 20, 2009), PostgreSQL.org will host a "Folder stuffing" pizza party on Friday evening of the SCALE convention. In addition to enjoying free pizza we will be "stuffing" PG folders with community literature. We highly encourage all to attend. If you are able to attend the pizza party please RSVP with an email to lapug@postgresql.org. Time: February 20, 7-10 pm (Friday Evening) Location: Rhythm & Hues 5404 Jandy Place Los Angeles, CA, 90066 Map: Rhythm & Hues Parking Instructions: We have two lots on either side of the building, I will see about getting the gate left open past 6pm, so people can drive in. Also, there should be plenty of on-street parking on Beatrice, a brisk 1 min. walk from the entrance. I hope to see everyone at the Pre-SCALE Pizza Party! [About LAPUG] [Join the Mailing List] [View List Archive]

slides from february postgresql portland performance speaker series presentation

markwkm — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 01:49:04 +0000

The slides from the February presentation is now available from the embedded link. The focus was on the database schema used and the SQL statements that are executed. The plan for the March 12, 2009, presentation is to have a live demo for using the DBT-2 test kit.

PDXPUG - February Meeting 2/19/2009 - Using iostat and blktrace to analyze i/o performance

markwkm — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:04:20 +0000

Ed Borasky will be speaking at the next PDXPUG meeting at FreeGeek (at 7:00pm - 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR). Common wisdom is that "PostgreSQL applications are I/O bound." Fortunately, Linux has two tools that make analysis of I/O performance metrics possible: "iostat" and "blktrace". "iostat" gives device-level operational queuing metrics, and in kernels since 2.6.25, queuing metrics for individual partitions as well. "blktrace" provides a detailed trace of every major event in the life of every I/O operation at the block layer. This talk looks at some recent "iostat" and "blktrace" results from a single-disk workstation running "pgbench". I'll include a brief overview of the operational queuing metrics that "iostat" gives, a brief run-down on how to install and run "blktrace", and some sample "blktrace" output. Looking forward to seeing everyone there....and of course, drinks at the Lucky Lab (http://www.luckylab.com/ ) at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. afterwards.

some dbt-2 results after running pgtune

markwkm — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 01:37:36 +0000

I think people agree that the default settings for PostgreSQL usually aren't the most optimal. As suggested I got some results after running the pgtune script. Greg Smith has more info on pgtune in his blog. So following some additional recommendations from Greg, this is what we've got. I've had these results in for over 4 weeks now (sorry). A trio of results with shared_buffers = 7680MB (oops, I don't remember why this wasn't set to 8GB) and checkpoint_segments = 100: 9210.66 notpm 9151.43 notpm 9171.46 notpm mean = 9177.85 notpm stddev = 30.13

Gauteng has a PostgreSQL User Group

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:49:49 +0000

Gauteng now has a PUG. In keeping with the naming pattern for PUGs it is called jnbpug, after the airport code for OR Tambo International. There is a mailing list for the group, details on the postgressql.org mailing list site. The first meeting for jnbpug is at News Cafe on New Road in Midrand at 19:00 on 9 February 2009. Nothing formal at all, just getting PostgreSQL users together to see who is doing what with it. Hopefully we can get some ideas together about what people would like to see presentations on and some volunteer presenters to build some more formal user group meetings in the future. RSVP to jnbpug(at)gmail(dot)com so we can arrange enough seating.

Jeff Davis on Streaming Databases, January 13, 2009

dfetter — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 02:08:32 +0000

Jeff's slides may be back soon ;)

looking for the proper number of database connections

markwkm — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 05:39:03 +0000

Jumping around, as usual, I ran a series of tests to determine the proper number of database connections for the DBT-2 workload at a scale factor of 1000. I previous ran some tests to get a baseline using 200 database connections. So here are some results: Number of connections: Throughput (notpm) 20: 5877.35 40: 7642.64 60: 8481.35 80: 8824.54 100: 9216.27 120: 9347.42 140: 9492.72 160: 9491.20 180: 9848.11 200: 9643.49 220: 9954.00 240: 9638.16 260: 9643.05 280: 9484.65 300: 9541.15 320: 9469.84 340: 9428.95 360: 9588.48 380: 9685.37 400: 9588.11 If the standard deviation holds true from the baseline testing, it appears that the sweet spot is around 220 database connections. The system still needs to be tuned better so we can't say for sure just quite yet.

prepping for ext4 with 2.6.28

markwkm — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:41:18 +0000

With the web server needing to reimaged (need to make time to get into the colo facility) I'll take the time to install 2.6.28 and run some basic file system tests against ext4. Stay tuned, it should a couple weeks or so run a series a tests...

Following up a couple questions from the presentation at PSU on January 8, 2009

markwkm — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 02:29:56 +0000

A couple of questions were asked during the presentation that aren't really covered in the slides, which I'll answer here: ----- What do I use to chart systems statistics from sar, iostat, vmstat, etc.? There a couple of perl modules that I try to maintain, Test-Parser and Test-Presenter. They can be downloaded from CPAN and the source is in subversion at: svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/crucible/Test-Parser Test-Parser svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/crucible/Test-Presenter Test-Presenter ----- What is 'iopp'? It's a custom tool to go through the Linux process table to get i/o statistics per process. It is open source and can be downloaded from: http://git.postgresql.org/?p=~markwkm/iopp.git;a=summary ----- Will there be a mailing list for these presentations? Not likely. Since we'll be discussing PostgreSQL performance, I believe it will be best to use the community mailing list for reaching out to a wider audience for performance discussions. Mailing list details are here: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance For other meeting related topics, I think we can use the PDXPUG mailing list: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pdxpug Hopefully this will meet our needs. ----

PDXPUG - January meeting next week!

gabrielle — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:07:38 +0000

Thursday Jan 15, 7:00 pm (that's 1900) FreeGeek: http://www.freegeek.org/ Topic: Lightning talks (http://perl.plover.com/lightning-talks.html - perl-centric, but you get the idea) Speaker: YOU! As always, beer afterwards at the Lucky Lab (easy walking distance from FreeGeek.) See you there!

slides from january postgresql portland performance speaker series presentation

markwkm — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 07:10:06 +0000

Two sets of presentations are available from the Portland State University Computer Science Department sponsored speaker series about Database Test 2 from January 8, 2009: Speaker Series Overview - what the speaker series is about: http://www.slideshare.net/markwkm/postgresql-portland-performance-practice-project-database-test-2-series-overview-presentation/ Database Test 2 (DBT-2) Background - a little history about how the test kit came to be: http://www.slideshare.net/markwkm/postgresql-portland-performance-practice-project-database-test-2-background-presentation/

p4 lab web server back online

markwkm — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:38:48 +0000

The web server hosting the web data is refreshed, hopefully it won't get compromised again: http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/507

[REMINDER] PostgreSQL Portland Performance Practice Project (P5)

markwkm — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:08:56 +0000

2nd THURSDAY OF EACH MONTH, BEGINNING JANUARY 8, 7:00 PM PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY, 1900 SW 4th AVENUE, FOURTH AVENUE BUILDING – ROOM 86-01 Full details: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~len/P5.pdf or: http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/504

[ANNOUNCE] PostgreSQL Portland Performance Practice Project (P5)

markwkm — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 05:12:18 +0000

Here's a copy of the flyer produced by Portland State University: ----- PostgreSQL Portland Performance Practice Project (P5) A series of presentations by Mark Wong Sponsored by the Computer Science Department, Portland State University This series will consist of 5 to 6 presentations aimed at PostgreSQL database users who wish to learn more about tuning their systems for performance. Attendees will learn how to generate and interpret operating system (Linux) and database statistics, and the effects of some system tuning techniques. This involves studying the well known Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) benchmark called TPC-C ( www.tpc.org ). TPC-C was developed by a committee, representing all major players in the database marketplace, to be representative of typical online enterprise databases. TPC-C consists of a precisely defined schema and 19 queries. We will review the schema and queries and demonstrate how each tuning technique affects their performance. We will use an open source package that the speaker has developed, called DBT-2, which many DBAs have found useful. Mark Wong has an MS in Computer Science from OGI and several years of experience developing and executing various database systems benchmarks. Most relevant to this series are his years spent at the OSDL developing and using a fair-use derivative of the TPC-C benchmark to characterize system performance of open source software. He now works at HP StorageWorks on their NAS products. For more information, contact Mark Wong at markwkm@postgresql.org. 2nd THURSDAY OF EACH MONTH, BEGINNING JANUARY 8, 7:00 PM PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY, 1900 SW 4th AVENUE, FOURTH AVENUE BUILDING – ROOM 86-01

compromised web server

markwkm — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 23:35:59 +0000

The system serving the performance data has been compromised. I will try to make time within a week to reinstall the operating system to be sure it's clean.

SydPUG meeting recap 8th December 2008

ccd — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 05:09:24 +0000

Welcome to the reborn SydPUG website! I'll be posting slides, photos and any other interesting material from each SydPUG meeting on this blog. I'll also try to dig up as many old presentation slide sets as I can and put them up here. Last meeting we had David Fetter speaking on new features in development for PostgreSQL 8.4, and Shyam Sundar from Greenplum on the architecture of the Greenplum database. Those interested in David's slides from the presentation can get them here. Thanks to everybody who came along to the meeting. Charles Duffy

shared_buffers pass 1

markwkm — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:11:19 +0000

The default shared_buffers is set to 24MB. We have a system with 32GB of RAM, and a database that was built from about 100GB of raw text data. So let's see how the throughput changes: shared_buffers: throughput 24MB (default): 8482.31 1024MB: 9079.04 2048MB: 8592.46 3072MB: 8381.82 4096MB: 8176.29 5120MB: 7928.06 6144MB: 7694.14 7168MB: 7688.55 8192MB: 7995.79 9216MB: 8313.94 10240MB: 8586.01 11264MB: 9001.89 12288MB: 9358.67 13312MB: 9512.67 14336MB: 9982.19 15360MB: 10299.08 16384MB: 9764.01 17408MB: 9524.58 18432MB: 8613.02 19456MB: 8749.34 20480MB: 8571.84 21504MB: 8071.21 22528MB: 11145.82 23552MB: 7115.30 25600MB: 3100.67 27648MB: 2809.22 29696MB: 1726.66 The trend is the throughput certainly has its ups and down and at first glance it seems that for this dataset, 22GB of shared_buffers allows for the most throughput. When looking a little closer, once we get past running with 2GB of shared_buffers the statistics are all over the place on all the charts. The reason for this isn't easily obvious. Digging in the data more might reveal the reason, but certainly this parameter should be revisited after the system is tuned more.

checkpoint_segments pass 1

markwkm — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 05:25:59 +0000

PostgreSQL sometime says this in the database log: LOG: checkpoints are occurring too frequently (17 seconds apart) HINT: Consider increasing the configuration parameter "checkpoint_segments". On an OLTP database (dbt-2) completely built on a single 25 disk RAID-0 partition, it appears increasing the checkpoint_segments may be detrimental to the workload. Observe what happens to the workload metric when increasing the number of checkpoint segments (click on the links to detailed system information): checkpoint_segments: throughput 3 (default): 8482.31 10: 7998.07 50: 7276.87 100: 7526.70 200: 7660.56 300: 7337.77 400: 7177.35 500: 7204.15 1000: 7242.18 1500: 7238.36 2000: 7282.31 3000: 7249.36 The checkpoint_timeout is set at the default 5 minutes and it appears somewhere after a checkpoint_segment size of 300, the throughput bottoms out. I hypothesize that we're hitting the checkpoint_timeout here. I base this on the i/o throughput charts, how they have peaks every 5 minutes suggesting heavy writing due to the database performing a checkpoint. Other than that, I don't have any other concrete evidence supporting that claim. Maybe there is something buried in the pile of system statistics from the test results. I encourage other to take a peek and post a message to the PostgreSQL performance mailing list. Stay tuned to see the effects of adjusting the checkpoint_segments when we start breaking up the database onto physically separate disks.

[REDUX] DBT-2 sizing has begun

markwkm — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:27:16 +0000

Got by some various open file and thread limit caps in Linux. I'm starting to baseline the system again with PostgreSQL 8.3.5 at a higher scale factor than before. So now I'm using a 1000 scale factor database created from about 100GB of raw text data. First sample of testing show that we're about 70% of the theoretical maximum throughput using this data set. Should have a reliable baseline from an un-tuned system in about 24 hours with an idea of variance in the results. Then back to characterizing various database and operating system parameters.

dbt-2 baseline at the 1000 warehouses scale factor

markwkm — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 04:18:07 +0000

So I have some baselines numbers now. Using a 25 disk raid-0 (stripe set) on XFS these are the numbers I get. Using 1 driver and 1 client: 8482.31 8574.99 8582.18 Average = 8546.49 Standard Deviation = 55.7 (0.65%) Using 2 drivers and 2 clients: 8412.77 8465.93 8450.95 Average = 8443.22 Standard Deviation = 27.41 (0.32%) Using 4 drivers and 4 clients: 8271.81 8369.11 8386.93 Average = 8342.62 Standard Deviation = 61.96 (0.74%) The database server is being driven by a 4 core system so i wanted to see if breaking up the driver into multiple processes would have any benefit. Doesn't really look like it but maybe I needed to pin processes to specific processors. Anyway, if I remember enough statistics this seems to suggest the results are fairly repeatable. For those familiar with the details of this workload, these numbers are about 70% of the theoretical maximum using a scale factor of 1000. That leaves us with a bit of headroom to see how much benefit tuning various parameters will give us. If we get too close to the theoretical maximum, we'll have to scale up the database.

Adelaide and Canberra join!

admin — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 17:41:44 +0000

David Fetter was busy at OSDC, recruiting new leaders for user groups! Please join me in welcoming Adelaide and Canberra! The fearless leaders are Tom - his handle is twright, and Brenden - his handle is direvus. Welcome!! -selena

effects of changing checkpoint_segments

markwkm — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 01:54:13 +0000

First thing I want to point out is that this is on an un-tuned system, but we have to start somewhere. When the system is tuned better this should probably be looked at again. Using DBT-2 with an 800 warehouse scale factor, we look in the database log and see lots of messages like:

checkpoints are occurring too frequently (17 seconds apart)
HINT: Consider increasing the configuration parameter "checkpoint_segments".
HINT: Consider increasing the configuration parameter "checkpoint_segments".

So let's start varying checkpoint_segments first (click on metric for full details from the test):

3 (default): 8984.46 notpm
30: 7181.21 notpm
300: 7888.86 notpm
3000: 7819.76 notpm

The database stopped warning about checkpoint_segments being too low somewhere after 30 but we also saw a sharp drop in throughput. And the chart of the throughput is more erratic. The spikes could be related to the default checkpoint_timeout of 5 minutes. There doesn't seems to be much benefit between 300 and 3000 segments. Maybe there is something more interesting between 30 and 300 though. I do expect the results to differ when the other parts of the system is tuned more. So let's see what happens in the future...

New server for storing and sharing results

markwkm — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 02:56:18 +0000

Thanks to Joshua Drake's generosity, I have a pair of disks in a mirror that should be able to store about 400GB of data. I have just set up a system to use those disks and I'll start moving the filesystem results and upcoming database testing results to that server. I'll starting mailing specific results to the mailing list and updating wiki.postgresql.org to point to the new location.

AustinPUG meeting, Thursday, Dec 4

decibel — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:24:13 +0000

Our next meeting will be Thursday, Dec. 4th at Sun. Robert Lor will be presenting on DTrace (the October meeting didn't actually happen...) Meeting is at 7PM.

lost 1 drive in the p4 lab

markwkm — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:15:22 +0000

We lost a 72GB hard drive to a failure. These 15K RPM SAS disks are expensive: http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product.asp?sku=3689701&pagemode=ca

PG presentation this Saturday in Columbus, OH

jwilliams — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:20:21 +0000

Apparently it's just been officially announced, so at the upcoming Central Ohio Linux Users Group meeting I'll be giving a second run of the Proprietary-to-PostgreSQL presentation. This talk was originally given at PG West 08. The COLUG meeting will be held this Saturday, the 22nd, from 1 to 3 PM. If you're familiar with the COLUG meetings, it's a slight change in venue, compared to what I'm used to at least. The site is the Franklinton Public Library, at: 1061 W. Town Street Columbus, OH 43222 http://www.columbuslibrary.org/ebranch/index.cfm?pageid=30&bldgid=410 Also on tap for the meeting is a Git presentation and a demo on replacing the firmware on a consumer router with Linux, which is always cool. Though it hasn't been updated at the time of this writing, more information will be up on the COLUG website at: http://www.colug.net/meetings.php

[UPDATE] PostgreSQL Portland Performance Practice Project (P5)

markwkm — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 03:10:07 +0000

We've settled on a time and location. We'll be at Portland State University in the Fourth Avenue Building on the second Thursday of the month starting in January. Full details to come after Thanksgiving.

DBT-2 sizing has begun

markwkm — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:47:29 +0000

Finally starting to run DBT-2 again on the DL380 and the MSA70 equipment donation from HP. Will be running trough some sizing exercises to run the system. Also should have a new web server set up soon so we can get the filesystem data and the upcoming DBT-2 data online soon. The SourceForge site for the project has not be online for several months now.

PDXPUG - Next meeting November 20, 2008 - Randal + Smalltalk

markwkm — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:16:45 +0000

While many people may know Randal Schwartz of Stonehenge Consulting (http://www.stonehenge.com/) from his talks and papers on Perl, he is also quite knowledgeable about Smalltalk and will be giving a talk on Smalltalk and Postgres integration. We will be meeting Thursday, November 20th, 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. afterwards.

i/o stats per linux process

markwkm — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:24:16 +0000

I threw together a cheezy little program called iopp (i/o per process) for Linux. It is sort of like iostat. You can find the git source repository here: http://git.postgresql.org/?p=~markwkm/iopp.git It grabs the i/o stats per pid from /proc//io. Details on the numbers can be found in the Linux source documentation in linux/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt. Here is a sample (which I'm sure looks terrible without a fixed width font): pid rchar wchar syscr syscw rbytes wbytes cwbytes command 6476 0 214170644 0 25967 0 119083008 0 postgres: writer process 6477 0 4816896 0 225 0 4816896 0 postgres: wal writer process 6478 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 postgres: autovacuum launcher process 6479 0 971574 0 339 0 1388544 1388544 postgres: stats collector process 6493 88530944 48218112 10807 4613 1867776 35487744 0 postgres: markwkm dbt2 [local] SELECT waiting 6509 88489984 49930240 10802 4828 2105344 36675584 0 postgres: markwkm dbt2 [local] SELECT waiting 6511 88580096 48078848 10813 4647 2007040 34799616 0 postgres: markwkm dbt2 [local] FETCH 6513 94191616 51380224 11498 5054 1875968 35905536 0 postgres: markwkm dbt2 [local] idle 6515 96821248 48766976 11819 4828 1744896 35381248 0 postgres: markwkm dbt2 [local] SELECT waiting 6517 90234880 43253760 11015 4144 1916928 31686656 0 postgres: markwkm dbt2 [local] idle 6519 87375872 47423488 10666 4664 2039808 34332672 0 postgres: markwkm dbt2 [local] SELECT waiting 6521 99205120 48455680 12110 4786 2154496 34734080 0 postgres: markwkm dbt2 [local] SELECT waiting What do you think? Useful?

[DELAYED] PostgreSQL Portland Performance Practice Project (P5)

markwkm — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:29:56 +0000

For those of you who were at PGWest 2008 and were expecting an announcement of a PostgreSQL performance specific meet up in November, you'll have to wait a little longer. We were not able to nail down a place to meet so we're going to start in January, after the holidays. I'm hoping to have details hammered out within a couple of weeks. Stay tuned...

Toronto PUG at Ontario Linux Fest

ian — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 22:23:21 +0100

Event: Birds of a Feather session on PostgreSQL at the Ontario Linux Fest Date: October 25th, 2008 (Exact time TBD) Location: Days Hotel and Conference Centre - Toronto Airport East. (See directions) RSVP: No need to RSVP, but registration is required for general entry to the Ontario Linux Fest TorontoPUG will be hosting a Birds of a feather (BOF) session for Postgresql users at the Ontario Linux Fest on Saturday Oct 25. The Ontario Linux Fest is a regional conference on Linux and other open source projects. It will be held at the Days Hotel and Conference Centre - Toronto Airport East. Directions are available on the Linux Fest website. See http://www.onlinux.ca/ for more information about the Ontario Linux Fest.

PDXPUG October Meeting - Oct 16

selenamarie — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:48:44 +0100

UPDATED Even though PG Con West will be going on October 10-12 in sunny (hopefully) Portland, we will still have our monthly meeting on October 16, 2008. This month, Selena Deckelmann will provide a tutorial on setting up Point-in-time recovery for your PostgreSQL installation. This will be hands on, with the ever-dangerous LIVE DEMO. We will be meeting at FreeGeek - 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR. In November, our own Randal Schwartz of Stonehenge Consulting (http://www.stonehenge.com/) will be giving a talk on Smalltalk and Postgres integration. Looking forward to seeing everyone there....and of course, drinks at the Lucky Lab (http://www.luckylab.com/ ) at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. afterwards. Tim (and Selena)

AustinPUG Meeting, October 7th

decibel — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 20:05:11 +0100

Our next meeting will be October 7th, 7PM at Sun. Robert Lor will be talking about DTrace. RSVP to austinpug@decibel.org or the mailing list appreciated.

4th TorontoPUG Meetup

ian — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 04:32:50 +0100

Event: TorontoPUG meeting Date: September 22nd, 2008, 7:30 PM Location: The Rhino (www.therhino.ca), 1249 Queen St. West, Toronto RSVP: Send a brief message to Ian: torontopug.september2008@hardcircle.net It's time for the monthly meeting of TorontoPUG! Please RSVP by sending a quick message to torontopug.september2008@hardcircle.net, and feel free to bring someone along! To get updates about future events, meet people between events, and suggest ideas for future events, please join our mailing list, accessible here: http://archives.postgresql.org/torontopug/. We are always looking for speakers interested in presenting to our group!

Toronto PUG Survey

ian — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 04:38:04 +0100

I've set up a brief (less than 5 minute) survey for anyone who is interested in the TorontoPUG group. I'd like to know what everyone is looking for to ensure that we are doing things people want to attend. I would appreciate the feedback, and would be happy to share the results after I close the survey.

PDXPUG - Next meeting September 18 - Visual Planner!

selenamarie — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 04:59:01 +0100

Topic: Visual Planner Presenter: Tom Raney, PSU Where: FreeGeek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR When: 7pm, September 18, 2008 Tom Raney will be presenting the Visual Planner, a GUI tool written in Java that enables the user to peek inside the PostgreSQL planner's decision making process. The tool shows all plans that were evaluated including the plan that was picked for execution. Tom worked on this during Google Summer of Code, and credits Dr. Len Shapiro, a professor at Portland State University and PDXPUG regular, as a great help. Tom showed off his tool during OSCON and has gotten some feedback from community members on it. He's working up a test example that should appeal to DBAs, and I'll link directly to the source code once he's got it ready. This work also involves a patch to PostgreSQL, which should be available soon! After the meeting, retire to the Lucky Lab for refreshments!

SFPUG September 9 Meeting

joshb — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:18:59 +0100

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!

Scaling Streaming Databases

dfetter — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:34:35 +0100

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.

AustinPUG meeting, Tuesday, September 2nd

decibel — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 22:11:10 +0100

The topic will be free-form ala a Bar Camp, so bring something you'd like to present about. Tips, tricks, cool stuff you / your company is doing, anything Postgres related is fair game! If you'd like to present, please post your topic here. Meeting will be at 7PM, and there will be free pizza!

PDXPUG August: Tsearch2 and Materialized Views

selenamarie — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:16:58 +0100

This month's PDXPUG meeting featured Lloyd Albin from SCHARP, the Statistical Center for HIV/AIDS Research & Prevention located near Seattle, WA. Lloyd was nice enough to drive down for the evening and tell us about some of the work he's done over the last six months. We had a couple announcements - we need talk ideas for future meetings! Please get in touch with Selena if you have ideas for a talk. Tom Raney offered to give a talk on his Visual Planner tool next month, and Len Shapiro offered to give a talk in January or February on teaching database theory using PostgreSQL. Also, PostgreSQL West is coming up. Get your talks submitted now! See: http://www.postgresqlconference.org/west08/ Lloyd started off with a description of some of the problems his group encountered that led them to use Tsearch. The researchers and financial group both needed to be able to search through most of the textual data, but didn't necessarily know ahead of time which tables or even the columns that they'd be most interested in. So, Lloyd helped construct search tables from the original tables that contained all of the text and references back to the original tables. SCHARP currently has about 1.5 TB of data spread across 6 PostgreSQL instances, BerkeleyDB files and spreadsheets. Using a series of triggers and materialized views (generated nightly to improve search speed), the search tables improved the search speed from 8-minutes per query to about 1/2 a second. Lloyd chose to use GIST indexes instead of GIN for speed, and is using the built-in dictionaries for now. He thinks in the future that they will have to generate custom dictionaries as their data set grows. Lloyd got permission to share his PL/Perl code and table structures. All that information is attached to this post.

OKPUG Second Meeting Wrap-up and Slides

esteele — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:20:27 +0100

For those of you who were were unable to make it last night, I've posted the slides on the PostgreSQL rule system below. I’d like to give a big thanks to RiskMetrics for letting us use their conference room and sponsoring the pizza! In addition to discussing the rule system, we brainstormed possible topics for the next few meetings (recovery options, psql client tricks, writing stored procedures, and postgresql.conf explanations and tuning). Recovery options (especially WAL archiving) won out for October's presentation. Our next meeting will be on Monday, October 20, at 7:00. I’m still looking into various venue options in Oklahoma City and will post possible locations when I’ve got a good list. Let me know if you have your heart set on somewhere. Right now, I'm trying to stick to no farther north than Downtown in order to keep it pretty central, but a great location could change my mind!

PDXPUG - August meeting coming up!

gabrielle — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:03:02 +0100

When: Thurs, 21 Aug 2008, 7pm Where: FreeGeek http://freegeek.org/ We'll have the usual opening festivities; perhaps OSCON recaps in haiku form? Our special guest this month is Lloyd Albin of SCHARP (Statistical Center for HIV/AIDS Research & Prevention, a division of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Institute of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center). Lloyd will be giving us a presentation on using TSearch2, materialized views, & user security. He recently created a real-time, continuously updated materialized view using TSearch2, with the additional requirement of only returning results on which the current PostgreSQL user has read access. Followed, as always, by beer at the Lucky Lab.

The Second OKPUG Meeting Is Soon Upon Us

esteele — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:29:53 +0100

The next OKPUG meeting is on Monday, August 18, from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm at RiskMetrics (2600 John Saxon Blvd Norman, Suite 200, OK 73071 -- it's 3 miles east of the National Weather Center on Highway 9). I will give a presentation on uses of PostgreSQL rules, and then there will be time for general discussion, questions, etc. Pizza will be provided by RiskMetrics (thanks!). We'll need a headcount for the pizza, so please RSVP by emailing okpug-owner at postgresql dot org or posting here. Hope to see you there!

3rd TorontoPUG Meetup

ian — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:45:49 +0100

Event: TorontoPUG meeting Date: August 25th, 2008, 7:30 PM Location: The Rhino (www.therhino.ca), 1249 Queen St. West, Toronto RSVP: Send a brief message to Ian: torontopug.august2008@hardcircle.net It's time for the third monthly meeting of TorontoPUG! For our first meeting, we will going back to a social setting at the Rhino. This will be an opportunity to meet others using PostgreSQL in the area, to learn how others are using PostgreSQL in different ways, or to learn basics about the PostgreSQL project. Please RSVP by sending a quick message to torontopug.august2008@hardcircle.net, and feel free to bring someone along! To get updates about future events, meet people between events, and suggest ideas for future events, please join our mailing list, accessible here: http://archives.postgresql.org/torontopug/. We are always looking for speakers interested in presenting to our group!

OKPUG Update and Next Meeting Info

esteele — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 22:31:36 +0100

Sorry it's taken me so long to post again! I got married in early July, and it was more distracting than I expected. OKPUG's first meeting went very well. There were eight people, tasty food, and a good discussion of possible future topics. Our next meeting will be on August 18 at 7:00 pm in Norman at RiskMetrics. We'll choose October's location at this meeting. I'll post more details and directions in the coming days.

July TorontoPUG Slides

ian — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:47:38 +0100

For those of you who could not make it, or who would like to find out more, here are the slides for the presentations at the July TorontoPUG. Thanks to all who came out! Our next meeting will be a social event on the evening of Monday, August 25th. The venue will be announced shortly.

AustinPUG meeting, Tuesday, August 5th

decibel — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:15:35 +0100

We'll have our next meeting 2 weeks from today at Sun, at 7PM. The folks from Neopost will be presenting about their experience upgrading to 8.3. RSVP appreciated to the mailing list or to austinpug@decibel.org.

July TorontoPUG Meetup

ian — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:23:27 +0100

Event: TorontoPUG meeting Date: July 28th, 2008, 7:30 PM Location: Nulogy Office, 183 Bathurst St., Suite 400, Toronto RSVP: Send a brief message to Ian: torontopug.july2008@hardcircle.net It's time for the second meeting of the Toronto area PostgreSQL User Group, aka TorontoPUG. Our next meeting is on July 28th, at 7:30 PM, at the Nulogy office (http://www.nulogy.com) . This will be an opportunity to meet others using PostgreSQL in the area, to learn how others are using PostgreSQL in different ways, or to learn basics about the PostgreSQL project. Bring your friends and anyone you know, everyone is welcome! This month, we will be featuring two presentations:

Steve Singer will be giving a presentation on various replication options for PostgreSQL
Ian Bailey (that's me) will be giving a presentation on the configuration options available in PostgreSQL

Refreshments will be available, so please RSVP by sending a quick message to torontopug.july2008@hardcircle.net to ensure there is enough for everyone. If you would like to present at this night or at a future one, please let me know so we can schedule you in the future. To get updates about future events, meet people between events, and suggest ideas for future events, please join our mailing list, accessible here: http://archives.postgresql.org/torontopug/.

The P4 Lab

gabrielle — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 18:51:50 +0100

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

PDXPUG PgDay - sign up!

selenamarie — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 03:11:06 +0100

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!

Program for LinuxWorld pgDay is up!

joshb — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:55:57 +0100

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

PDXPUG Day Talks announced!

selenamarie — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:25:22 +0100

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!!

July 8 Meeting: PostgreSQL 12th Anniversary!

joshb — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:06:19 +0100

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

Looking for presenters

ian — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:18:06 +0100

For the next TorontoPUG (to be held on July 28th, 2008), we will be moving to an office area, where we want to hold a few quick (15-20 min) presentations on a few different topics. This is an open call to the community asking if anyone would be interested in presenting a topic on PostgreSQL. Some topics our members would be interested in learning about include (but feel free to suggest your own topic):

A brief overview of replication options
PostGIS
An overview of tweaking PostgreSQL databases
Differences and gotchas moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL

If you are interested in presenting, please send an email to torontopug.july2008@hardcircle.net and/or to our mailing list.

Sponsorship Opportunity: LinuxWorld, OSCON

joshb — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:17:22 +0100

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.

Toronto PUG Night

ian — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 04:49:05 +0100

Event: TorontoPUG meeting Date: June 23rd, 2008, 7:30 PM Location: The Rhino (www.therhino.ca), 1249 Queen St. West, Toronto RSVP: Send a brief message to Ian: torontopug.june2008@hardcircle.net I'm pleased to announce the first meeting of the Toronto area PostgreSQL User Group, TorontoPUG! Our first meeting will be on June 23rd, at 7:30 PM, at the Rhino. This will be an opportunity to meet others using PostgreSQL in the area, to learn how others are using PostgreSQL in different ways, or to learn basics about the PostgreSQL project. Please RSVP by sending a quick message to torontopug.june2008@hardcircle.net so we can ensure there is enough space. To get updates about future events, meet people between events, and suggest ideas for future events, please join our mailing list, accessible here: http://archives.postgresql.org/torontopug/.

Call for Presentations: pgDay San Francisco 2008

joshb — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:11:34 +0100

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.

OKPUG's First Meeting

esteele — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:55:25 +0100

The Oklahoma PUG will hold it's first meeting on June 23 from 7:00 to 9:00 pm at Coach's in Norman, OK. Since I'm still trying to gauge local interests in Postgres, there will not be a scheduled presentation. Instead, we'll discuss suggestions for future topics, Postgres interests and experiences, and tangentially related miscellany. If you have questions, please let me know at okpug-owner@postgresql.org or by posting here. To join our mailing list, visit http://archives.postgresql.org/okpug.

SFPUG June: Parsers & pgCon

sfpug — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:25:53 +0100

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.

Meeting topics through July!

selenamarie — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:37:32 +0000

Here are the meetings and topics PDXPUG has scheduled through July: * 3/20/08 - Managing internet services: using the right tool for the job (Ed Sawicki) * 4/17/08 - Ruby on Rails Essentials for PostgreSQL Enthusiasts (David Wheeler) * 5/15/08 - Pythoneering with PostgreSQL (Jason Kirtland) * 6/19/08 - The Relational Model (Jeff Davis) * 7/17/08 - Pre OSCON/PgDay meeting - TBD * 7/20/08 - PDXPUG PgDay at the Convention Center

AustinPUG Meeting, June 3rd 7PM

decibel — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:40:32 +0100

It's been a month already! We'll be meeting tomorrow at Sun, 7PM. Meeting topic will be configuration tuning and/or discussion of PGCon. Please make sure to RSVP to the mailing list or austinpug@decibel.org so that we can get a count for Pizza! Sun Microsystems Building 8 - Longhorn Conference Room 5300 Riata Park Ct Austin, TX 78727 Map

OSCON PostgreSQL Day July 20th - Save the date!

selenamarie — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:00:51 +0000

Save The Date: OSCON PostgreSQL Day Call for papers PostgreSQL community, The O'Reilly Open Source Conference 2008 schedule will soon be revealed, and some of you -- especially those speaking -- will be making your travel arrangements to visit Portland. But, wait! Before you buy your plane tickets, you'd better know about the PostgreSQL Day hosted by PDXPUG! What: All-day PostgreSQL one-track mini-conference When: Sunday, July 20th, 9am to 5pm, possible party afterwards Who: PDXPUG will select speakers Where: Portland Convention Center, Portland, Oregon Of course, we are also looking for speakers for the PostgreSQL Day. PDXPUG wants four hour-long sessions and one 2.5-hour workshop. Please e-mail selena -at- postgresql.org with your offer to speak and speakers will be selected in mid-April. Thanks to Josh Berkus, Joshua Drake, the OSCON conference and PDXPUG for helping make this happen!

PDXPUG Meeting 6/19/08: The Relational Model

selenamarie — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 02:40:30 +0100

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."

PDXPUG: PostgreSQL for Pythoneers!

selenamarie — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:32:50 +0100

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!

PostgreSQL Day at LinuxWorldExpo SF

joshb — Mon, 12 May 2008 23:47:47 +0100

The San Francisco PostgreSQL User Group, together with PostgreSQL.us, will be having several events around LinuxWorldExpo in San Francisco On August 5th, in space generously donated by IDG, we will have a full day of PostgreSQL technical sessions. This will be followed by some kind of social event with drinks & food. We will also have a booth, of course and are seeking booth volunteers. Watch the SFPUG page for more details!

SFPUG meeting: multi-master replication

joshb — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:52:38 +0100

Dirk Jagdman will demonstrate his multi-master replication system for PostgreSQL. Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 7:00 PM EzRez San Francisco 50 1st Street 7th Floor San Francisco, CA 94105 There will probably be free food (but there's a chance you'll be asked to chip in). RSVP to our Meetup page or the mailing list.

First AustinPUG meeting: Success!

decibel — Wed, 07 May 2008 03:33:18 +0100

We had our first meeting today and it was a great success! We had an even dozen folks, a great discussion of the future of the PUG, and everyone managed to stay awake during my presentation! We agreed to having the next meeting Tuesday, June 3rd, 7PM at Sun. Everyone who's interested in the AustinPUG should sign up on the mailing list.

Road Trip!

gabrielle — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:42:06 +0100

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.

First Austin PUG Meeting, May 6th, 6PM

decibel — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:03:02 +0100

Part of Austin's Geek culture? Work for a company using an open source database? Interested in Keeping Postgres Weird? Then join us at the first meeting of the Austin Postgres User's Group on Tuesday, May 6th at 6PM! The rough agenda will be: 6:00 - 6:30 Meet 'n greet 6:30 - 7:15 Discuss goals for the AustinPUG 7:15 - 7:45 Presentation: What's new it 8.3? 7:45 - 8:00 Wrap-up The meeting will be held at Sun's offices in Riata: Sun Microsystems Building 8 - Longhorn Conference Room 5300 Riata Park Ct Austin, TX 78727 Map We will have to register everyone who is attending as a visitor; to make this as efficient as possible, please RSVP to austinpug@decibel.org. Oh, and there's one more reason to register... FREE PIZZA! I'll be ordering from Mangia's; please let me know if you'd rather chow down on spinach, pepperoni, or Chicago style (or if you really can't eat any of the above...)

PDXPUG - Rails on PostgreSQL meeting wrap up!

selenamarie — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:44:09 +0100

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.

SFPUG April Meeting: PostgreSQL Saves the Day.

dfetter — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:37:47 +0100

When: Tuesday, April 8, 7:30pm Where: Casa Donde, Oakland What: John Zarrella shows how PostgreSQL helps a small business make a crucial transition.

BWPUG starts!!

admin — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:54:30 +0100

Check out Baltimore / Washington PUG. They're first meeting is on May 14th, 2008. Subscribe to the mailing list (or the RSS feed) so that you don't miss out! Mailing list is bwpug@postgresql.org. To subscribe, send the message "subscribe bwpug" in the body of the email to majordomo@postgresql.org.

April Meeting - Ruby on Rails Essentials for PostgreSQL Enthusiasts - David Wheeler

gabrielle — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:00:05 +0100

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" --- See you there!

ATLPUG - IRC Virtual meeting

atlpug — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:55:14 +0100

Hey, y'all; let's hit the ATLPUG IRC channel at 7:30 this (Tuesday, 8 April) evening to brainstorm about topics of interest to ATLPUG. Hope to see y'all there! :)

March 20th meeting Recap and slides from intro

selenamarie — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 01:29:01 +0000

Just quickly uploading some slides from the meeting. Covered all the crazy conferences coming up soon, and included a plug for Summer of Code and PostgreSQL -- if you're a student, its $4500 for the summer and great experience! Check it out!! Also, a few slides about USPA and what we're up to! Check out Joshua's recap of our ice-breaker over on his blog. Ed Sawicki gave an overview of spam supression techniques he's using and gave us a few tips on tools that were useful to him. We recommended he have a look at some CIDR address types available on pgfoundry.org to help with some performance issues he found.

Recap: ATLPUG First Meeting

atlpug — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:57:40 +0000

Last Tuesday, March 18th, ATLPUG had its first successful meeting. Over half a dozen people, with PostgreSQL experience varying between interested newcomers and years of PostgreSQL experience, users with terabyte PostgreSQL installs and others checking out various PostgreSQL LiveCDs (Ubuntu | Fedora), and programmers in many languages, including Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and one brave COBOL programmer. ;) We discussed each other's projects, exchanged some tips, waxed rhapsodic about the performance improvements in 8.3, talked about some of the upcoming conferences (including PostgreSQL Conference EAST, PGCon, and OSCON PostgreSQL Day [as well as OSCON itself]) as well as the new United States PostgreSQL Association. I look forward to seeing y'all again next month! If you're interested in joining ATLPUG, please sign up for the mailing list. Thanks again, everyone! :)

Next Meeting: March 20, 2008 - Managing internet services: using the right tool for the job

selenamarie — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:06:21 +0000

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!

First Moroccan Postgresql Meeting

Diablo22 — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:53:40 +0000

Hello! We will have a meeting the Saturday March 22 2008 10:00AM for the first Moroccan Pug Meeting. Anyone who is interesting can join. A minimal database knowledge is required, we will discuss about how Postgresql can be a better alternative for many projects we actually running. The meting will be discussed in French, English and Arabic! For more info , contact me at terminale at gmail dot com! The location will be in Tangier! See you soon

SFPUG March Meeting: CRUD & ORM using .NET

dfetter — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 23:38:38 +0000

When: Tuesday, March 18, 7:30pm Where: Carbon Five, San Francisco What: Jon Asher shows off his company's .NET ORM system which does automated CRUD for PostgreSQL, and talks about how application-specific ORM can be developed. RSVP via http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/7321956/ or via the mailing list if you want to be fed.

Jon Asher presents PostORM, Tuesday, March 18th at 7:30pm

dfetter — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:36:41 +0000

RSVP below to get details and food http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/7321956/

SPUG Meeting Locations

spug — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:23:22 +0000

Where would you like to meet? Please answer the poll at: http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/369 LewisC

Postpone First Meeting

spug — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:17:07 +0000

Hi all, I dropped the ball on this one. To be honest, March 11th got here much faster than I planned. I will reschedule for a new date as soon as seems reasonable. I'm hoping that we will get some activity on the email list. Sign up at: http://archives.postgresql.org/spug/ Let me know your preferences for location and time. If you would like to volunteer for the the group (officers and such), please do so. Let me know if you would like to speak also. Thanks, LewisC

SPUG Mailing List

spug — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:14:46 +0000

Hi all. If you are interested in the Suncoast Postgres User Group, please sign up for (and post to) the email list: http://archives.postgresql.org/spug/ Thanks, LewisC

RESCHEDULED: ATLPUG Opening meeting

atlpug — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:35:35 +0000

Hey, y'all; due to a pair of funerals I've attended these past few days, I'm behind on meeting planning. Let's have the first meeting next Tuesday, March 18th, at 6:30 PM in the Buckhead Borders (in the upstairs coffee lounge). At the meeting, we'll look at a pair of PostgreSQL LiveCDs, discuss organization of the Atlanta-Area PostgreSQL User Group, talk about upcoming conferences (PostgreSQL Conference EAST and PGCon 2008), and generally geek out over the world's most advanced open source DB. ;) Leave a comment or drop an email to atlpug@postgresql.org if you're planning on attending; I look forward to seeing all of y'all next week! :)

Extreme Database makeover: RT meeting recap

selenamarie — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:39:26 +0000

[cross posted w/ photos at selena's blog] [Update: SQL for database schema courtesy of David Wheeler now included at the bottom of the page.] Last night, PDXPUG and Code-n-Splode got together to refactor the database for RT. David Wheeler, Jeff Davis and Mark Wong led the discussion. Through the course of the meeting, the group chose to pick out a few key features that would be better served if the database schema was more normalized, and offered a few new constraints we thought would help manage the data. Toward the end of the meeting, Igal suggested having a Perl workshop to refactor the code related to one or more of the database changes. The idea here was to be helpful, rather than just poking holes in the schema. David started the discussion off with an introduction to RT. RT was created about 10 years ago by Jesse Vincent of Best Practical, and the database schema has been augmented over the years to accommodate new functionality. They support both MySQL and PostgreSQL as backends, and tend to dislike using database-specific technology. The killer feature in RT is its email-to-ticket functionality. Managing tickets directly from email is convenient and reduces the maintenance overhead for users and developers. RT has some great workflow controls - allowing specific actions to be taken when certain types of changes occur in a ticket. David reviewed a few key tables, and focused in on tickets, transactions and attachments. These tables are ones he was most familiar with from integrating RT in with I Want Sandy. A few key observations were:

No foreign key constraints
"Polymorphic relations" (tables storing multiple types of information)
Default values in columns could be nicer

Addressing these three issues could fix potential data integrity problems, improve searchability and the make SQL queries of the data simpler and easier to maintain. We were also interested in improving the quality of the data stored in each row through constraints. After this overview, we dove into a couple problems. First, we weren't sure in the database how to group workflow actions together. Based on the database, each transaction is independent, and "scrip" actions appear to be based on a row insert. The symptom of this is that if you create a workflow control, you can't group together two "transactions" and yield a single email response. You'll get an email for each transaction recorded in the database. We didn't dig into the associated Perl modules, but from a database perspective, a straight-forward normalization exercise solves the problem. We renamed transactions to ticket_events, and added a secondary table containing ticket_data. This new structure allows for multiple ticket_data rows to be linked to a single ticket_event. A simple view on these two tables could present nearly the same information as is available in transactions today, but now the system could group multiple ticket_data together. We also tackled the schema representing email messages and their relationship with tickets. The existing database requires a JOIN between transactions and tickets to find. David and Jeff laid out a message table, split out interesting fields in email to make search and comparison easier. They also a foreign key to link email directly to both tickets and ticket_events. Toward the end of the meeting, Mark wrote out the foreign key relationships for the new relational schema. We really needed a schema->diagram system so that we could view the schema in real-time. Some suggestions were made to use Autodoc with GraphViz to get real-time visualization of the entire schema. Next time! The discussion also ranged into synthetic vs. natural keys, appropriate use and definition of NULLs, the difference between Entity relationship diagrams and relational schema diagrams, and the utility of workshops like this one to see how other people think about schema refactoring. Before the meeting, David spent about an hour digging into the schema and talking with RT developers to get a feel for what types of changes they'd be open to. We're not sure that the suggestions from our little workshop will be incorporated, mostly because the codebase for RT is large and complex. David's plan was to send the suggestions on to Best Practical.

RESCHEDULED: Extreme Database Makeover - RT 2/26/08, Cubespace

selenamarie — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:03:56 +0000

Topic: Extreme Database Makeover: RT Speakers: Jeff Davis, Mark Wong, David Wheeler When: Tuesday, February 26, 2008, 6:30pm Where: Cubespace, 622 SE Grand Avenue, Portland, OR 97214 (In association with Code-n-Splode http://pdx.codensplode.org/) Come join us for a little fun with RT. Jeff Davis recently went through an implementation of RT and had a few suggestions for their database schema. David Wheeler and Mark Wong promised to come help "refactor". There is a .dot representation of their schema out on the web, and I figured I/we could print this out, and maybe bring in a few sheets of paper to document our changes. If anyone has a printer and a few moments to volunteer, I'd appreciate help with the printing. At the end of the meeting, we'd like to pass on some of our suggestions to the good folks at Best Practical. Afterward, we'll seek refreshments at the Side Door Pub!

Google Summer of Code for PostgreSQL

selenamarie — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:46:51 +0000

Google Summer of Code 2008 is starting now. We need to get our projects page up to date: http://www.postgresql.org/developer/summerofcode We also need PostgreSQL contributors to volunteer as mentors. As well as the core code, *any* project in the PostgreSQL "family" is eligible, including drivers, GUIs, documentation, replication, applications and tools. Don't be shy! Mentors must be patient, friendly, easy to stay in touch with, knowledgeable about their project areas, and able to commit to spending several hours a week helping their student(s) from May to August. GSOC is an unparalled opportunity for our project to recruit new contributors, and get students interested in databases. We have one week to get everything together. So please respond soon!

February Meeting: Monitoring Tools

selenamarie — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:41:20 +0000

Topic: Monitoring tools Speakers: YOU! When: Thursday, February 21, 2008, 6:30pm Where: FreeGeek, 1731 SE 10th Ave I will bring my latest horrific collection of Perl scripts. Mark will bring something more impressive. We can talk about ptop!

Welcome to the Atlanta-area PostgreSQL User Group Blog!

atlpug — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 22:08:37 +0000

Hello, everyone! We're starting an Atlanta-area PostgreSQL User Group; the first meeting will be on Tuesday, March 11, 2008 at 6:30 PM (at a place TBD), where we'll organize more formally (elect officers, etc.) and discuss the great new features of 8.3. Look forward to seeing you there!

LAPUG Launch!

selenamarie — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:16:57 +0000

Saturday night, February 9, at 8pm, Richard Broersma and a crew of 15 launched LAPUG. Noel Proffitt, from the City of Garden Grove, gave a great talk on time-oriented (or temporal) database design. He presented an example of a set of columns, rules and triggers for tracking both valid and transaction time. Noel also was kind enough to give a plug to the temporal data type that Jeff Davis and I presented last PGDay before OSCON. There was some suggestion that Jeff should submit the code for version 8.4. We also showed off the new PUGs website, and talked a little about what had brought people to the BoF. A few students from Cal Poly were there, along with many experienced administrators from around LA. Richard mentioned that his company was willing to host the group’s first meeting, and Noel offered to bring a projector. The group also asked about potential topics, so I am going to start a talks repository on the PUGs site. Ultimately, I’d love to have the authoritative and searchable repository of PostgreSQL talks for all PUGs to use as starting points and references. I’m looking forward to great meetings from LAPUG in the future!

Hello and Welcome to the Suncoast Postgres User Group Blog

spug — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 03:12:26 +0000

Mark your calendars! March 11, 2008 will be the first official meeting of the Suncoast Postgres User Group (SPUG). This meeting will cover choosing officers and creating the user group structure. Since this is the first meeting, it will be virtual. I will announce further details in the next week or so. At this time, I am thinking the group will meet the second tuesday of each month. That schedule is subject to agreement by the board, once elected. Thanks for visiting and keep an eye out for details. LewisC

MADPUG meets tonight!

selenamarie — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:28:09 +0000

This just in from Chander on the pgsql-advocacy mailing list:

I know it's kind of late notice, but a bunch of local PostgreSQL folks (and non local ones) are getting together tonite at 7 PM at the Carolina Ale House at Briar Creek: http://www.carolinaalehouse.com/locations.shtml Alexander Place 7981 Skyland Ridge Raleigh, NC 27617 (919) 957-4200 We will talk some about the new PostgreSQL 8.3 release and its features. If you need directions, would like to attend, or have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me at the number(s) below. I'd call this the second meeting of MADPUG (The Mid-Atlantic District PostgreSQL Users Group).

Meet PostgreSQL folks at SCALE!

selenamarie — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:17:41 +0000

Members of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group will be staffing a booth at SCALE, the Southern California Linux Expo. Our booth will be staffed from 10am-7pm Saturday February 9 and Sunday February 10. We're also having a BoF at 8pm, Saturday February 9 in the Laguardia Room. Word is that Noel will be presenting some slides on designing temporal databases:

I'm planning on doing a broad overview of how temporal data has been traditionally handled in a database application and strategies for designing temporal data into the Postgres databases.

See also this email. We hope to see you there!

Synchronized Scanning, Jeff Davis

selenamarie — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0100

PDXPUG Day

selenamarie — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 13:13:23 +0100

Guava

selenamarie — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 13:39:27 +0100

Object-Oriented Database Design

selenamarie — Tue, 15 May 2007 11:25:37 +0100

Replication with Slony

selenamarie — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:55:58 +0100

DOMAINs - February 2007 Meeting

selenamarie — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 09:44:11 +0000

Jan 2007 - Oceanography and PostgreSQL

selenamarie — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 08:23:22 +0000

December Meeting

selenamarie — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 07:50:30 +0000

November 2006 meeting

selenamarie — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 12:00:00 +0000

October meeting

selenamarie — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 12:00:33 +0100

Performance!

selenamarie — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 10:22:05 +0100

pSQL Administration - August 15, 2006, 7pm - FreeGeek

selenamarie — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0100

Relational Algebra Meeting Summary

selenamarie — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:17:38 +0100

PL/pgSQL - July 19, 2006, 7pm - FreeGeek

selenamarie — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 16:56:39 +0100

Choose a meeting day

selenamarie — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 10:06:23 +0100

Intro and Mailing list established!

selenamarie — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 11:22:43 +0100

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 - Meetup on Oct 19

selenamarie — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:36:38 +0100

PostgreSQL Performance, October 18, 2007

selenamarie — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:00:00 +0100

ptop - Nov 15

selenamarie — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:17:55 +0000

meeting recap - hackathon

selenamarie — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:52:45 +0000

10 things you can use in PostgreSQL 8.3

selenamarie — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:00:00 +0000

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 - Hotel recommendations

selenamarie — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 13:44:42 +0100

next meeting - Dec 11

selenamarie — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 14:10:05 +0000

Relational Algebra

selenamarie — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:00:00 +0100

Portland PostgreSQL Users Group SIte Launch

selenamarie — Sat, 24 Apr 2004 12:30:54 +0100

A Brave New Blogging System

selenamarie — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 18:12:29 +0000

I'm testing out the new drupal installation. Next steps: * Fix the CSS to make it look more like our movable type installation * get accounts set up * migrate content * advertise!!