The inaugural PGConf US Local: Ohio Conference (PGConf Ohio) will be held September 29th - 30th at the Hyatt Regency Columbus Ohio (350 North High Street Columbus, Ohio, USA, 43215).

• Friday, September 29, 2017: Training. Registration for the PGConf Ohio trainings is open now.

Mastering Postgres Administration: Bruce Momjian

Summer is officially over (although the calendar says otherwise), the kids are back in school, the last three-day camping weekend of the season has passed, and we are staring right at PostgresConf Silicon Valley starting September 18th! Registrations for this fantastic event have already exceeded 2018 numbers and our training day is showing great success. 

Conferences

• PostgresConf Silicon Valley 2019, September 18th - 20th, 2019
• PostgresConf South Africa, October 8th - 9th, 2019
• PostgresConf 2020, CFP now open!, March 23 - 27th, 2020

Digital Events

• YugabyteDB Distributed SQL Webinars
• A series of free webinars discussing technical opportunities with Distributed SQL. YugabyteDB is an Open Source, Postgres compatible Distributed SQL database.

News

• Greenplum 6 is now GA
• Building a distributed time-series database on PostgreSQL
• Release v2.1.0 of PgCLI
• Ajqvue Version 3.0, a java-based UI which supports PostgreSQL, released
• PostgreSQL 12 Beta 2 Now Available in Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment

Learn

• PostgreSQL in 4 hours
• Remote backup and restore with PgBackrest
• PgBouncer gets SCRAM!

 

Partner Conferences

Register Today for API World 2019 and Save $200!

The API World team has offered us 25 free OPEN Passes and discounted PRO Passes to API World 2019 so our members can attend the event.

 

API World (October 8–10, San Jose Convention Center) is the world’s largest API & Microservices conference and expo with 3,500+ attendees, 60+ exhibitors, and 10+ tracks covering API Lifecycle Management, API Innovations, Microservices, Containers, Kubernetes, and more. 140+ speakers include leaders from Intuit, US Bank, IBM, Okta, Capital One, Box, Kong, GitHub, Comcast, Microsoft, Postman, Twillio, SendGrid, Oracle, Ford, UPS, Uber, Google, eBay and 100+ more. 

GitLab Commit, our premier community event, brings together the GitLab community to connect, learn, and inspire. We want to make sure the NY tech community is well-represented at Commit so we are offering a HUGE discount to members of local tech community groups. You can use code 'COMMITCOMMUNITY102' to save 50%. 

 

Why did you attend PgConf US?

We have been looking for high quality, experienced, professional support for our application’s database for some time. We have found it difficult to find help online… seemingly every phone number we called was just an answering service. When we heard that the companies offering the level of service we were looking for were all available in the same place, we couldn’t resist.

Tell us a little bit (one or two paragraphs) about your project:

Our project (VX and VO collectively named Victor) is a SaaS solution for 911 emergency response systems. Victor provides analytics and quality assurance tools and services, enabling agencies to assess performance, measure resource & deployment activity, model demand, optimize workload, and even generate financial estimates. For more information see our website.

Why did you chose PostgreSQL for your project?

Victor requires both time and spacial awareness, along with all the other things that are expected from an RDBMS. PostgreSQL is stable, secure, mature, well documented, open source, actively developed, community supported, and generally bad ass. The choice was easy.

As I understand it, attending PgConf US was a last minute decision. Do you think it was worth it? If so, why?

Absolutely! Our objective was to meet with vendors who were able to provide high quality support and we were successful. Additionally, we met a ton of super geniuses (Paragon, TimescaleDB, I’m talking about you) and learned more then expected. For example, we had no idea we could put raster images in PostgreSQL and process them with PostGIS… amazing!

Would you attend PgConf US again?

Yes… see above. Unrelated, but unbelievably cool, we met a guy named Solar… a PhD (from MIT!) passionate about carbon nanotubes.

Are you interested in contributing to the community and if so, in what fashion?

Yes! …and here is our biggest piece of feedback.

It would be great if there was a clear point of entry for people like us… we have been using PostgreSQL for several years, have been through several upgrade cycles (we started on 9.0) and have no idea how our skills could be of use. We make SaaS applications, but make nothing in C. What else does the community need? How can we help?

Why did you attend PgConf US?

Our company is exploring the use of PostgreSQL as an additional DBMS choice to support Vertex Enterprise, our tax technology platform. Attending the conference offered me an opportunity to immerse myself into a variety of topics around PostgreSQL, as well as the chance to interact with other users to tap into their experiences.


Tell us a little bit about your project or how you use PostgreSQL:

Vertex Enterprise is a global tax management end-to-end solution that integrates all tax processes with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI) systems on a single platform using a tax performance engine.   The solution is a blend of technologies that surround a Java based processing and calculation engine. This includes rich UI's, import, export, business intelligence / reporting, and big data integration. The foundation of our database leverages a multi-dimensional database structure, as well as other structures whose design varies based upon the needs of a particular function so that we can optimize performance. (ie. import/export/reporting).

The official brochure provides a high level overview of the capabilities and interfaces that our DBMS must support.  

Why did you chose PostgreSQL for your project?

PostgreSQL checks many of the boxes that we are looking for in our consideration of an additional DBMS option.


Some of these include:

* Performance
* Lower cost
* Multi-tenancy support 
* Suitable for deployment on premise, in a hosted environment, and in the cloud
* Industry acceptance
* Ease of administration on locally administered instances
* Features characteristic of an enterprise strength database (auditing, partitioning, replication, procedural language support)


This was your first PGConf US, was it a last minute decision? Do you think it was worth it? If so, why?

The conference was on our radar since the beginning of the year, and it exceeded expectations. Listening to and interacting with actual contributors to the product is not something you have the opportunity to do at many conferences. The sessions covered a variety of topics around PostgreSQL that were of interest (performance, tuning, feature discussion, lessons learned, cloud deployment options, optimization, etc).


Would you attend PgConf US again?

Yes, definitely. 


Are you interested in contributing to the community and if so, in what fashion?

My "day job" keeps me pretty busy, but as far as sharing our experience with PostgreSQL, I am willing to contribute in that way :) .

• Amazon
• Pivotal
• 2ndQuadrant
• Microsoft
• Timescale
• HighGo
• Data Dog
• Fivetran
• BlueTalon
• Goldman Sachs
• forhims
• Immuta

On occasion, professional developers will drop into the Postgresql.org mailing lists, meetups, and conferences to ask the question, “Why isn’t PostgreSQL development on Github?” In an effort to see if the demand was really there and not just anecdotal we ran a poll/survey over several social media platforms that asked a simple question:

 

Should PostgreSQL development move to Github?

• Yes
• No
• No, but to something like Gitlab would be good

 

We received well over 300 responses and the majority (75%+) chose a move to Github or to something like Github. This was an unscientific poll but it does point out a few interesting topics for consideration:

 

1. We need to recognize that the current contribution model does work for existing contributors. We need to have an honest discussion about what that means for the project as contributors age, change employment, and mature in their skill set, etc..
2. Of the people that argued in comments against the move to a service, only one is a current contributor to PostgreSQL.org core code. The rest were former code contributors or those who contribute in other ways (Advocacy, System administration, etc.).
3. Would a move to Github or similar option produce a higher rate of contribution?

 

This poll does not answer point #3; it only provides a data point that people may desire a modern collaboration platform. The key takeaway from the conversation about migrating to Github or similar service is the future generation of developers use technology such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. They expect a bug/issue tracker. They demand simplicity in collaboration and most importantly they will run a cost->benefit analysis to determine if the effort to contribute is a net positive.

 

It should also be considered that this is not just individual potential contributors. There are many corporations big and small that rely on the success of PostgreSQL. Those corporations will not contribute as much directly to PostgreSQL if the cost to benefit analysis is a net negative. They will instead contribute through other more productive means that produce a net positive when the cost->benefit analysis is run. A good example of this analysis is the proliferation of external projects such as pg_auto_failover, patroni and lack of direct contribution from innovative extension based companies.

Do we need a culture shift within PostgreSQL?

There are those within the Postgresql.org community that would suggest that we do not need a culture shift within PostgreSQL but that does not take into account the very clear market dynamics that are driving the growth of PostgreSQL, Postgres, and the global ecosystem. It is true that 20 years of hard work by Postgresql.org started the growth and it is also true that the majority of growth in the ecosystem and community is from products such as Greenplum, Aurora, Azure, and Timescale. The growth in the ecosystem is from the professional community and that ecosystem will always perform a cost to benefit analysis before contributing.

 

It is not that we should create radical rifts or disrupt our culture. It is to say that we must evolve and shift our community thinking. We need to be able to consider the big picture. A discussion should never start as an opposition to change. The idea of change should be an open discussion about possibility and vision. It should always include whether the change is a good idea and it should always avoid visceral reactions of, "works for me,” “no,” or “we tried that 15 years ago." Those reactions are immature and lacking in the very thing the community needs to continue to grow: positivity, inclusion, vision, and inspiration.

Join the PostgreSQL community in Philadelphia on July 13th and 14th 2017 for two days of fantastic PostgreSQL content. July 13th will contain trainings and July 14th will be breakout sessions. The call for papers and sponsors is also open! When submitting papers to PGConf US events, please review the presentation guidelines.



PGConf US Local events are designed to bring comprehensive educational content and networking opportunities to the "local" PostgreSQL community where the event is being held. They are perfect opportunities to show support for PostgreSQL, find leads and build relationships with other professionals and companies using and support PostgreSQL.










d at Huntsman Hall at The Wharton School

Join the fantastic and growing Postgres community in Cape Town, South Africa for a single day event on October 3rd, 2017! The event is being hosted by fellow Postgres advocates who travel from South Africa each year to attend our National Event in order to increase their knowledge of Postgres and be a part of the community. This year they are joining us and making a commitment to build out our International community and conferences!

• The CFP is open is open from now until August 25th. We will notify speakers by September 1st! Talks are subject to our presentation guidelines.

Local events are designed to bring comprehensive educational content and networking opportunities to the "local" Postgres community where the event is being held. They are perfect opportunities to show support for Postgres, find leads, and build relationships with other professionals and companies using and supporting Postgres.

After National 2017, the PGConf US team decided to take a long hard road to bring the best in educational content and advocacy to the entire Postgres ecosystem. Today, we welcome 2ndQuadrant as a Platinum sponsor and thank them for helping us with our year over year projects.

Other PGConf US news:

That's right, folks; the time has come.