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

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!

We will be having another PRP soon, as well as a YAMS hackathon.  We may combine the two into one event.  Watch this space for details.

Here are Tim’s slides from his Database Trending talk last night.  I can’t wait to try this at home!

Database Trending

I converted his .odp slides to .ppt so’s I could a) upload them to WP (no .odp allowed!) and b) include his notes.

Tim started a new job earlier this year and was looking at how to gather some performance metrics to measure database performance over long periods. While these will change since he works in a very fluid environment, being able to see some differences over time will allow for some forecasting as well. Tim will start by showing some of the things he’s identified, and the code he has, to track these elements and then will lead a round-robin discussion of what other people may be doing to
capture their own metrics.

Tim Bruce has been working with computers for over 25 years doing Data Management, Programming, Systems Administration and Database Administration. Currently, Tim is the Database Administrator for Conducive Technology, the company behind FlightStats.

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!

I’d like to express my appreciation to FreeGeek for hosting us for the first five+ years of PDXPUG:  meetings, classes, Relational Algebra Cocktail Parties, and Normalization Puppet Theater. Thank you so much for providing a meeting space for us!

This presentation is primarily focused on how to use collectd (http://collectd.org/) to collect data from the Postgres statistics tables. Examples of how to use collectd with Postgres will be shown. There is some hackery involved to make collectd do a little more and collect more meaningful data from Postgres. These small patches will be exploited. A small portion of the discussion will be about how to visualize the data.

Mark hangs out at Postgres gatherings here and there to pass the time since he doesn’t really do performance work anymore. [ed: so sad!]

Beer afterwards at the Lucky Lab. See you there!

This month we’ll be hearing from Brent Dombrowski. Brent says: “”I spent this summer at the Center for Coastal Margin Observation and Prediction migrating a PostGIS-enabled PostgreSQL database to the latest stable releases. I’ll cover my experience migrating the database and my amateur attempts to improve its performance after the migration. Note: This will not cover what PostGIS can do, but will cover what you need to add PostGIS to PosgreSQL.”"

Brent is a graduate student at Portland State pursuing an MS in Computer Science. He’s completed the Database track and plans on graduating next Spring.

This month we’ll be having our meeting on the west side, at Iovation, 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!

The office is on the 32nd floor. Pizza & bevs will be served around 6:15pm; the regular meeting will start at the usual 7pm time. Building security will close access to the floor at 7:30, so make sure you’re on time.

After-meeting meeting location will be Bailey’s or Tugboat, determined by a coin toss. See you there!

This presentation provides down-to-earth performance advice.

Joshua D. Drake (JD) is lead consultant at Command Prompt, Inc. and
President of PgUS.

Beer afterwards at the Lucky Lab. See you there!

Rob Wultsch, a recent addition to Facebook’s Database Operations team, will compare and contrast the Facebook deployment with his previous work with another large deployment of open source databases. In this db-agnostic talk, he’ll go over: the bizarre becoming ordinary, the many types of infrastructure that do not scale and what does and does not work when building a DBA team.

Before joining Facebook, Rob worked for a very large hosting company as a database administrator and a newspaper as a web developer. In his free time he enjoys riding his motorcycle and bicycle and fantasizes about moving to Portland.

As always, beer afterwards at the Lucky Lab. See you there!