PDXPUG August 22nd: Benchmarking with Benchbase

2024 Thursday August 22nd Meeting 6:30pm:8:30pm

Location: American Red Cross

3131 N Vancouver Ave · Portland, OR

Speaker: Paul Jungwirth

Benchmarking is an important part of developing database systems like Postgres. For businesses, benchmarking can guide important decisions around selecting a database management system, or evaluate configuration changes. However, while there are many standard benchmarks out there, setting up, configuring, running, and collecting results was left as an exercise to the reader.

Benchbase is an open-source benchmarking framework from Carnegie Melon University’s Database Group (https://github.com/cmu-db/benchbase). It helps you configure, run, and collect results from various standard benchmarks. It also provides a framework for authoring your own performance benchmarks, and wiring it up to the batteries-included configuration, running, and results collection provided by it.

Paul is going to walk us through Benchbase, and some recent work he has embarked on around creating a benchmark. If you are a veteran of benchmarking, or have never done a benchmark before, this talk is for everyone.

Now a bit about Paul. He’s a freelance software developer here in Portland, and has been building applications with Postgres since 2011. Paul has been working on the Postgres project itself. He’s authored many database extensions, and his contributions to Postgres include work on GiST indexes, multiranges, and SQL:2011 application-time features.

PDXPUG June 20th: Temporal Data

2024 Thursday June 20th Meeting 6:30pm:8:30pm

Location: American Red Cross

3131 N Vancouver Ave · Portland, OR

Speaker: Paul Jungwirth

I am so excited to announce that this month we have Paul presenting on temporal data. In this presentation, we’re going to get an introduction to temporal data, talk a bit about the SQL:2011 standards around it, and finally Paul’s work on integrating it with Postgres. He’ll also, time permitting, discuss some ideas for taking temporal data beyond the standard with features like temporal outer joins and aggregations.

Now a bit about Paul. He’s a freelance software developer here in Portland, and has been building applications with Postgres since 2011. Paul has been working on the Postgres project itself. He’s authored many database extensions, and his contributions to Postgres include work on GiST indexes, multiranges, and SQL:2011 application-time features.

I’m looking forward to seeing you all at the meeting and for a fascinating presentation.

PDXPUG May 16: Success With Postgres Sequences

2024 Thursday May 16th Meeting 6:30pm:8:30pm

Location: American Red Cross

3131 N Vancouver Ave · Portland, OR

Speaker: Gabrielle Roth

We are so excited to have Gabrielle presenting this month. Gabrielle is one of the founding members of the Portland Postgres Users Group, and has been an active member of the Postgres community for over 15 years. Currently she’s working at a small consulting company offering data solutions to scientists, which, in her words, is pretty close to her dream job of park ranger DBA.

This presentation is going to cover Postgres sequences. Gabrielle will walk us through how to set yourself up for success and avoid exhaustion. If you already found yourself in trouble, she is going to walk us through int to bigint conversions. We’ll also look at few different strategies to fixing exhausted or nearly exhausted sequences.

Come join us!

PDXPUG April Meeting: What’s new in PostgreSQL 17

Please RSVP on Meetup https://www.meetup.com/pdxpug/events/300096141/ so we have an idea how many folks are attending!

Date: Thursday April 18th, 2024
Time: 6:30pm to 8:30pm US Pacific

Location:
American Red Cross
3131 N Vancouver Ave, Portland, OR 97227

Speaker: Mark Wong

PostgreSQL 17 will be in feature freeze at the time of our April meeting, so let’s give it a look! Expected release date is September 2024.

As we’ve done for previous version previews, we’ll review presentations freely available on the Internet to see what we can can expect in this upcoming major release.

Come learn what’s coming up, share experiences with the changes if you’ve beta tested, or just meet with local peers! This is a casual, informal group.

Parking is available in front of the building. Please be prepared to show ID and sign in with security when entering the building. We will be in the Columbia Room on the second floor.

PDXPUG Mar 21: Replication with Postgres

2024 Thursday Feb 15th Meeting 6:30pm:8:30pm

Location: American Red Cross

3131 N Vancouver Ave · Portland, OR

Speaker: Grant Holly

This presentation will cover replicating your data with Postgres with a focus on streaming and logical replication. We are going to look at how the different kinds of replication work. It will be whirlwind trip through the use-cases, advantages, and challenges with different kinds of replication.

If you are a Postgres veteran and can configure replication from memory: this talk is for you. If you are someone new to Postgres, or someone who is just curious about Postgres: this talk is for you too! I’m always open to questions.

Hi, it’s me again. I’m Grant. I’ve been working with Postgres in production since version 9.2. I’ve been a speaker and subject matter expert on Postgres. Along with Mark Wong, I co-lead the Portland Postgres User Group.

PDXPUG Feb 15: Zero Downtime: Live Data and Server Migrations

2024 Thursday Feb 15th Meeting 6:30pm:8:30pm

Location (different than last time):

American Red Cross

3131 N Vancouver Ave · Portland, OR

Speaker: Grant Holly

Moving a live production dataset between servers is hard to do. I’m going to share a few examples of how I’ve been able to move data and workloads between servers without downtime, dropped writes, or stale reads. I had to break out more than a few Postgres tricks like logical replication, foreign data wrappers, and writable views, all of which we will be reviewing. 

My goal is to share a few strategies that have worked and how they handle the common difficulties with moving live datasets. Please bring your own stories and questions and add to the conversation.

PDXPUG Nov 2: What’s new in PostgreSQL 16

Please RSVP in MeetUp if you can: https://www.meetup.com/pdxpug/events/296865128/

2023 Thursday November 2nd Meeting 6:30pm:8:30pm (Note non-typical week.)

Location (different than last time):
American Red Cross
3131 N Vancouver Ave, Portland, OR 97227

Speaker: Mark Wong

Parking is available in front of the building. Please be prepared to show ID and sign in with security when entering the building. We will be in the Columbia Room on the second floor.

PostgreSQL 16 was released on September 14, 2023 so let’s give it a look!

We will shamelessly use a presentation readily available on the internet to see all the newness in this latest release.

Come learn what’s new, share experiences with changes, or just meet with local peers! Casual, informal.

Note that this will be the last PDXPUG meeting of the year until 2024.

PDXPUG Aug 17th: Developing Your Own Database Extensions

2023 August 17th Meeting 6:30pm:8:30pm

Location: LAST MINUTE LOCATION CHANGE
830 NE Holladay Street Portland OR 97232

Speaker: Jerry Sievert

Extensions are part of what makes Postgres such a powerful and popular database. Being able to add new capabilities to your database allows developers to adapt Postgres to many different use cases from geospatial (PostGIS), to multi-server sharding (Citus), to custom datatypes (pg_semver), to foreign data wrappers (postgres_fdw), and others.

Jerry is going to walk us through getting started working on database extensions. We will cover how extensions work and getting started authoring your very own first database extension! Time permitting, and with interest, we will cover operators and types. This talk is intended for all developers and DBA’s alike, so bring your questions. If you have a favorite extension, we want to know, so bring it to the discussion. I’ll go first: favorite extension: most flavors of FDW’s for sure.

Now a bit about Jerry. He’s currently working at Hydra (https://hydra.so/) on data warehousing with Postgres, but has been using Postgres for waaaay too long. If you’ve ever used PLJS (https://github.com/plv8/pljs), he’s the author, and he is the maintainer of PLV8 (https://plv8.github.io/).

Feel free to join us remotely if you’re up for it: meet.google.com/joa-iefd-pjp

PDXPUG June 15: SQL Antipatterns

2023 June 15th Meeting 6:30pm:8:30pm

Location:

PDX Code Guild
407 NE 12th Avenue, Portland, OR 97232
The parking lot is behind the building on Flanders.

Few abstractions and tools have proved as enduring in the field of Computer Science as the relational database model. Due to the diligent efforts of the Postgres team, the Postgres project has an ever increasing popularity in the software world and a fully modernized feature set. One effect of the longevity of the project has been to create a deep pool of received wisdom regarding the use and misuse of Data Models and SQL. Revisit some of the wisdom from a classic of the genre: SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming by Bill Karwin, with updated opinions and commentary to modernize the material. Stay after for pizza and a rousing exchange of ideas on the past, present, and future of SQL and of the Postgres project.

Speaker: Joseph Hammerman

Joseph Hammerman is a Linux Systems Administrator and Database Reliability Engineer with 18 years of experience. For the last 10 years that work has focused on Postgresql database reliability and High Availability engineering practices. Some career highlights include: serving on the iHeartRadio launch team, working at SecondMarket prior to and during their acquisition by NASDAQ Private Markets, and founding and serving on the Squarespace Database Reliability Engineering team. He is currently employed as Technical Lead for the DataDog Postgresql database reliability engineering team. He is a passionate advocate of Free and Open Source software and the ideals that it embodies.

Join us remotely here: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89600352541?pwd=eFBNV2F5K1VibTAvcENmQzBUMDRLZz09

PDXPUG May 2023: Django and Postgres

2023 May 18th Meeting 6:30pm-8:30pm

Location:

PDX Code Guild
407 NE 12th Avenue, Portland, OR 97232
The parking lot is behind the building on Flanders.

Speaker: Grant Holly

Getting started with Django is a delight. However, as your application grows, that sqlite database you start with can become a limitation. We are going to look at how to wire up a new Django project to Postgres, and we will talk about some of the neat features in Postgres and Django that you can utilize including JSON, UDFs/procs, and extensions to name a few.

Hopefully you can pick a few ideas, or even share your own with the group. This talk is for all levels of experience from “I just heard about Django” to “We run production Django”, from “oh Postgres, that’s the elephant one right?” to “Ask me anything about Postgres”.

You can join us remotely here: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88555410564?pwd=UitzL1pxTkNsTkFQdHA2K1ZVVXRrZz09