PDXPUG: May meeting: Lightning Talks

When: 7-9pm Thu May 16, 2013
Where: Iovation
Who: Group
What: Lightning Talks

Recent presentations have sparked several conversations of the “no sh–, there I was” variety, so for May we’ll be doing Lightning Talks. Bring your stories of wizardry, abject failure, and “Hail Mary” passes. We do request that your topic have something to do with Postgres, but that’s the only requirement – you don’t even need to have slides if you don’t want to. If you’ve never given a talk before, a lightning talk is a great low-risk way to try it out!

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Our meeting will be held at Iovation, on the 32nd floor of the US Bancorp Tower at 111 SW 5th (5th & Oak). It’s right on the Green & Yellow Max lines. Underground bike parking is available in the parking garage; outdoors all around the block in the usual spots. No bikes in the office, sorry!

Building security will close access to the floor at 7:30.

After-meeting beer location: Huber’s. See you there!

PDXPUG: April meeting in two weeks – eXtreme Database Makeover

When: 7-9pm Thu April 18, 2013
Where: Iovation
Who: PSU students
What: eXtreme Database Makeover: Portal, part 2

Usually when we do Extreme Database Makeover, we’re referring to the schema. This time, we’re going to do some GUC tuning. The Portal database is running pretty close to a default configuration, and we can help the student admins improve that.

This will be a group effort; bring your favorite performance tuning references.
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Our meeting will be held at Iovation, on the 32nd floor of the US Bancorp Tower at 111 SW 5th (5th & Oak). It’s right on the Green & Yellow Max lines. Underground bike parking is available in the parking garage; outdoors all around the block in the usual spots. No bikes in the office, sorry!

Building security will close access to the floor at 7:30.

After-meeting beer location: Huber’s. See you there!

PDXPUG: March meeting: Autovacuum and You

When: 7-9pm Thu March 21, 2013
Where: Iovation
Who: Gabrielle Roth
What: Autovacuum and You

Autovacuum’s like a Roomba, right? You just turn it on and it does all the work for you. Well, not quite – for one, your pets can’t ride around on it – and occasionally it may get stuck in a (figurative) corner. In this talk, we’ll discuss vacuum, analyze, and their daemonic counterparts: how to adjust them to perform appropriately*, and perhaps more importantly, what the heck are they actually doing?

This is a beginner-to-intermediate level talk, but you will learn something new about vacuuming, regardless.**
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Gabrielle Roth is a consultant with EnterpriseDB. She specializes in network, database, and system monitoring, as well as abusing SQL.

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Our meeting will be held at Iovation, on the 32nd floor of the US Bancorp Tower at 111 SW 5th (5th & Oak). It’s right on the Green & Yellow Max lines. Underground bike parking is available in the parking garage; outdoors all around the block in the usual spots. No bikes in the office, sorry!

Building security will close access to the floor at 7:30.

After-meeting beer location: Huber’s, the oldest bar in Portland. See you there!

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* No hairballs were harmed in the making of this talk.
** Offer void in California, New Hampshire, and if you are Tom Lane.

State of the Portland PostgreSQL Performance Pad

Wikipedia recently donated two Dell PowerEdge 2950s for the Pg QA Platform. Mark Wong & I have made a few trips out to the colo to get them racked up and online (with Chelnik‘s help, of course.)

We were quite surprised when we received the servers; Wikipedia included full rackmount kits, instructions, and cables, all in the original packaging. More than we expected, and much appreciated!

Unfortunately, after installing the OS, one of the PowerEdges had a spontaneous failure of its RAID controller. Troubleshooting continues, but at this time it looks like that box is destined to be a “parts car”. Naturally, one of the other servers took that as a cue to reject *its* raid controller. (Why does this happen?) That server was hooked up to the Powervaults, so we don’t have a NAS right now.

Once we get all this sorted out, we’ll be consolidating projects on to the remaining servers.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the new equipment, and to CMD for continuing to sponsor hosting at SpireTech.

PDXPUG: February meeting this week

When: 7-9pm Thu Feb 21, 2013
Where: Iovation
Who: Selena Deckelmann
What: Dawn of a New Backup Era

Backing up PostgreSQL, like most any database, has never been a simple situation.

Come learn about the latest in backup tools for PostgreSQL. Core tools like pg_basebackup have replaced most of what experienced DBAs used to write shell scripts for. We’ve also got a quiver of third-party tools that compliment and improve upon the core.

Finally, every backup plan needs a solid testing and restore routine. Selena will share a couple useful tricks for getting this into a regular cycle of updates that your developers and operations team both can use and appreciate.

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Selena Deckelmann is a major contributor to PostgreSQL, runs conferences, and keeps chickens. She’s also one of the founders of PDXPUG.

PDXPUG: January meeting

When: 7-9pm Thu Jan 17, 2013
Where: Iovation
Who: John Melesky
What: PostgreSQL in the Cloud: Theory and Practice

We’ll kick off 2013′s meetings with John Melesky, giving an updated version of his talk from PgOpen:

There are decades of accumulated knowledge in optimizing relational databases, and so much of it is either unhelpful or downright counterproductive in modern, resource-contentious, cloud-based environments. Disks aren’t disks any more, RAM might not be RAM, and latency has become more than intermittent.

We’ll discuss why and how the cloud is different from traditional hardware, and how that impacts existing optimization strategies. We’ll formulate new strategies for the new environments. And we’ll test those strategies on PostgreSQL on actual cloud instances (including EC2).

[Hear that, folks? LIVE DEMO. -ed.]
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John’s been using PostgreSQL since around v6.3, which was … a long time ago, technology-wise.

He spends his days working with data, and trying to turn it into useful information.

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Our meeting will be held at Iovation, on the 32nd floor of the US Bancorp Tower at 111 SW 5th (5th & Oak). It’s right on the Green & Yellow Max lines. Underground bike parking is available in the parking garage; outdoors all around the block in the usual spots. No bikes in the office, sorry!

Building security will close access to the floor at 7:30.

After-meeting beer location: Huber’s. See you there!

PDXPUG: November meeting recap

We had a great meeting last week, with over 20 attendees turning out to hear Greg Smith get into some exciting details about VACUUM. Video will be posted once we filter out some feedback.

Slides are here:

http://2ndquadrant.com/media/cms_page_media/59/ScalingMaint.pdf

His autovacuum cost estimator spreadsheet is here (and also linked from the .pdf above):

http://highperformancepostgres.com/pgopen-2012/

Thanks to Iovation for hosting and providing yummy sandwiches, and to Greg for flying all the way out here.

As usual, no meeting in December. As usual, go to the 6th Annual Winter Coders’ Social instead:

http://calagator.org/events/1250463028

We’ll start back up on January 17. John Melesky will be giving a newer version of his talk from PgOpen, PostgreSQL in the Cloud.

PDXPUG: November meeting reminder

Our November meeting is this week! Greg Smith will be talking about Scaling Database Maintenance.

See the original announcement for more details.

PDXPUG: November Meeting in three weeks

Sending the announcement out a bit early this month so you can get this on your calendar, because you don’t want to miss it. Greg Smith is visiting our fair city & will be speaking at our November meeting!

When: 7-9pm Thu Nov 15, 2012
Where: Iovation
Who: Greg Smith
What: Scaling Database Maintenance

When your database is small, the database’s autovacuum background daemon will keep up with the routine maintenance work that tables and indexes need. Once your database is larger though, and larger typically starts in the 100GB or 100M row range, the automatic maintenance as it’s tuned by default won’t be good enough.

This talk will introduce what VACUUM and autovacuum do. Some common manual settings and approaches for larger databases will be outlined. You’ll get a spreadsheet to help with tuning the tricky autovacuum settings. Finally, re-building indexes with minimal downtime will be outlined, emphasizing techniques introduced in PostgreSQL 9.1 that make that job easier.

Greg Smith is the Principal Consultant at 2ndQuadrant US and author of “PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance”.

Our meeting will be held at Iovation, on the 32nd floor of the US Bancorp Tower at 111 SW 5th (5th & Oak). It’s right on the Green & Yellow Max lines. Underground bike parking is available in the parking garage; outdoors all around the block in the usual spots. No bikes in the office, sorry!

Building security will close access to the floor at 7:30.

After-meeting beer location TBD. See you there!

Upcoming meetings

October:
We’ll have a query tuning workshop at our next meeting, on October 18.

Please submit your query to the mailing list beforehand, so we can plan an agenda.

November:
We have a special guest scheduled for our November 15th meeting! Greg Smith from 2nd Quadrant will be visiting us, topic TBD.