PDXPUG: September meeting coming up

When: 7-9pm Thu Sep 20, 2012
Where: Iovation
Who: David Wheeler
What: Sqitch

SQL change management is hard. Most “migration”-style implementations require opaque naming conventions, prefer DSLs that cover a fraction of SQL, and require duplication of code for simple changes to existing functions. Such does not have to be. And now it’s not

Introducing Sqitch, simple SQL change management that doesn’t suck. Sqitch doesn’t care what programming language your app is written in. It has no opinions as to what database to use or what its schema should look like. And it doesn’t require sequentially-named migration scripts or the use of any DSL other than SQL. Sqitch lets you to write SQL migration scripts thar target your database, and provides a simple, unintrusive interface for specifying dependencies, so that it can run things in the proper order.

So come to this talk to learn all about Sqitch: How it works, where to get it, and how to get the most out of managing database deployments.

David Wheeler is Senior Data Architect at iovation and an associate at PGExperts. He is responsible, among other things, for PGXN, pgTAP, and DesignScene. He lives in Portland unless he’s traveling with his family.

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!

PDXPUG: August meeting in two weeks

When: 7-9pm Thu August 16, 2012
Where: Iovation
Who: David Kerr
What: Vertically Scaling Postgres

Horizontal Scaling is all the rage today with commodity and virtual servers coupled with Puppet, Slony, etc. or Streaming Replication making it so easy to have a ton of small servers configured similarly all running multiple copies of your database.

But what’s the fun in that?

This talk will be about scaling Postgres Vertically on large machines and the challenges and lessons learned from working on big beefy servers.

Dave Kerr is the Lead Database Administrator and Architect for the Northwest Evaluation Association. He’s been working with databases for 15 years with the past four being dedicated solely to Postgres.

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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 TBD, but is likely to be Huber’s. See you there!

July meeting: OSCON BoF + booth

This month, we’re moving our regular July meeting over to OSCON. We’ll be having a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session on Wednesday July 18, in room D135 in the conference center: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2012/public/schedule/detail/25096

We’re also in need of volunteers to staff the PostgreSQL booth on Wednesday and Thursday. Sign up here:
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Oscon_2012_signup

PDXPUG: June meeting in two weeks

When: 7-9pm Thu June 21, 2012
Where: Iovation
Who: Daniel Johnson
What: Databases from Android

Daniel Patrick Johnson works with many technologies. Since early 2011 this has included Kinect controlled rockem sockem robots, desktop applications in C++, gstreamer, web server migrations, USB drivers, wireless interfaces for microcontrollers, Android, Ruby on Rails, and Puppet. Generally working on whatever is interesting, or pays the bills.

Here’s Daniel’s description of his talk:

“On the Android platform responsiveness, minimizing resource use, and fault tolerance are valued much higher than overall performance. Android applications are recommended to use a local database both as a way to persist data in case of application termination, or network connection error, and as a caching mechanism to minimize network usage. This introduces a significant amount of extra work for the developer, and the sync issues may significantly affect the design of the server side database, and API.

Android libraries try to make this easier. My talk will introduce concepts with code so that you can get started right away.”

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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 TBD. See you there!

PDXPUG: May meeting in two weeks

When: 7-9pm Thu May 17, 2012
Where: Iovation
Who: Ed Snajder
What: Replication Without Tears

“Database replication is a great way to tackle challenges with scaling, concurrency, availability and redundancy. It is common to all well-known database engines, and in Postgres, there are almost too many choices. In this demo-driven presentation, I will review a few of the options available for replication in PostgreSQL Systems. While the concept of replication is really quite straightforward, it can be unusually painful to configure and maintain. Furthermore, each particular method of replication includes its own significant pros and cons. My hope is that some of my discoveries will ease the pain and reduce the tears of configuring and managing your own replicated systems.”

Ed Snajder is the Database Administrator at Jive Software, and has been working with databases for over 10 years. His currently responsibility is predominantly PostgreSQL systems administration, though he still actively works through challenges with Oracle, SQL Server and MySql. A native New Yorker, Ed moved to Portland in 2006 and had the opportunity to operate as the DBA for the Systems running the NTIA Analog-to-digital Convertor Box Program. Outside of technology, Ed enjoys music and sports appreciation, and recently started a grass-roots effort to officially rename Beaverton to “The Tron.”

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!

April Meeting Recap

23 people showed up last night to check out Veronika’s data search app. Highlights for me were leaving the data in its native format (NetCDF, csv, etc) and building metadata around it, and being able to expand your original search to include more ‘data near here’. Plus I learned a new word, “pessimal”).

Daniel Johnson won the ticket to OSBridge. Congrats!

Thanks to Iovation for the space, sandwiches, and beer.

Next month, Ed Snajder will be talking about “Replication Without Tears”. See you then!

PDXPUG April meeting in two weeks

PDXPUG: April meeting

When: 7-9pm Thu April 19, 2012
Where: Iovation
Who: Veronika Megler
What: “Data Near Here”: Building A Search Engine for Data using PostgreSQL

We’ve heard a lot about Big Data. Scientists are creating data archives that are terabytes, petabytes and even brontobytes in size. But now they’ve collected all this data, how do they find what they’re looking for? Current techniques quickly fail.

“Data Near Here” is a working prototype of a search engine, built on PostgreSQL, that uses Internet search-like techniques to attack this problem. This presentation describes the app itself, and some of the techniques used and challenges encountered during its (continuing) development.

Veronika is currently “taking a sabbatical” from her working life, by pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at Portland State University. This presentation is based on her research there. Her core expertise is in adoption of emerging technologies. Her career has taken her into almost every corner of the computer industry, including operations, application development, systems programming, systems management disciplines, project management, and IT management consulting. Fun facts: She’s famous for something she did as an undergrad – writing a cult computer game, in Assembler. She built her first computer with a soldering iron, out of capacitors and resistors bought individually. (Really).

We’ll also be raffling off a ticket to this year’s OSBridge: http://opensourcebridge.org/

The 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!

PDXPUG: March meeting next week

When: 7-9pm Thu Mar 15, 2012
Where: Iovation
Who: Brent Dombrowski
What: NoSQL for People Living Under a Rock

This will be a high level overview of NoSQL things both hip and hiding. Warning: There will be rants, disclaimers, and possibly professional hecklers from Portland State University.

Brent is a Masters Student at Portland State University pursing a degree in Computer Science with an emphasis on data bases. He looking forward to seeing how well all this theoretical stuff works in the real world.

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The 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!

February meeting recap

18 people came to our February meeting! Welcome to all the new folks & we hope to see you again. John entertained us with “Locking War Stories”; his slides are here. We took a large group over to Huber’s for the post-meeting meeting where we continued the discussion.

Thanks to Iovation for providing sandwiches, and thanks to John for speaking on such short notice.

PDXPUG: February meeting

When: 7-9pm Thu Feb 16, 2012
Where: Iovation
Who: John Melesky
What: Locks… etc.

High-traffic systems have to deal with locks. That’s just the way it is. But that’s okay! Locks invisibly help manage concurrency! Properly structured transactions will never run into deadlocks with each other! Right?

Well, sometimes locks are very visible, and sometimes you end up with deadlocks that don’t make sense. I’m going to talk through a couple of row-locking problems I’ve run into, and explain how and why that should end up changing PostgreSQL’s SQL syntax.

John’s been poking computers since he was old enough to type, which was long enough ago that he debated whether to make a “POKEing” joke. He’s a Software Engineer at Janrain, working with the reporting and analytics infrastructure.

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!