PDXPUG April Meeting recap

What a great meeting last night! Made me feel a bit better about missing PgConf.US 🙂

We had a good turnout, too; several first-timers showed up, some hauling themselves all the way in from Nike & Intel.

Thanks to Eric Ferreira, AWS Database Engineer, and Tony Gibbs, AWS Solutions Architect, for coming all the way down from Seattle to give this excellent talk. Eric is the originator of Redshift (it’s based on Pg 8.0.4), and he shared with us some of the features & why he made some of the decision he did.

Special thanks goes to Veronika Megler, RDS Professional Services team, for proposing the topic and arranging for Eric & Tony to come on down to PDX.

We’re already working on a return visit for late summer, so if you missed this meeting, you will get another chance.

PDXPUG February Meeting Recap

Mark & I left David Wheeler in charge of the PDXPUG February meeting while we were at SCALE last week.

Here’s David’s report:
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This week Dave Kerr discussed using Bucardo mutli-master replication to gradually migrate a production database from EC2 to RDS. This work allowed his team to switch back and forth between the two systems with the assurance that the data would be the same on both. It also allowed them a fallback in case the RDS database didn’t work out: the S3 system would still be there. The discussion allowed those present to complain about Bucardo, EC2, RDS, and the French.
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Thanks!

PDXPUGDay 2014 report

We had about 50 folks attend the PDXPUGDay 2014 last week, between DjangoCon and Foss4g. A lot of folks were already in town for one of the other confs, but several folks also day tripped from SeaPUG! Thanks for coming on down.

Thanks again to our speakers:
Josh Drake
David Wheeler
Eric Hanson
Veronika Megler
Kristin Tufte
Josh Berkus

(Plus our lightning talk speakers: Josh B, Mark W, and Basil!)

And our sponsors:
2nd Quadrant
iovation
PGX

And of course, PSU for hosting us.

Videos are linked from the wiki.

Eight years of PDXPUG

I updated our speaker and topic tag clouds for our 8th anniversary.

Streaming Rep Lab Part 2 – recap

We had our Streaming Rep Lab followup last night¹. It was mostly successful: half of the new people got it up & running, and the people who’d been at the previous workshop got to experiment with almost everything on the agenda.

The cheatsheet is up on our git repo: https://github.com/pdxpug/cheatsheets ².

We talked a bit about monitoring and messed around with some of the available functions (e.g. pg_last_xact_replay_timestamp), started looking at pg_xlogdump (for “educational purposes”, of course), checked out a packet capture between the master & standby, and finished up with breaking the link between the master & the standby: the standby cried a bit about not being able to reach the master, but as soon as we restored the link, everything was fine.

The overarching theme of the evening is that we need to come up with a more robust plot to make Postgres fail in an interesting way.

SELECT pg_last_xact_replay_timestamp(); will give you a WAL ID, but is only valid on a standby.
The function to translate it to a file name: SELECT pg_xlogfile_name([id]); can only be run on the master. So that’s kinda weird and requires some puzzling out.

I started a wiki page of ideas for future labs, but we may be hung up on streaming rep & breaking it for a little while 🙂

Thanks to Emma for hosting & providing dinner!

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1 – With a puppy.
2 – Yes, I know there is something wrong with the step numbering. It renders correctly in github’s md validator, but not when I upload it.

[PDXPUG] Streaming Rep Saturday Recap

6 folks turned out for our first Streaming Replication lab day. Here’s what we accomplished:

– lively discussion about the different pieces involved (WAL files, various GUCs, etc)
– worked on a step-by-step cheatsheet
– got sr running between two vms, between two Pg instances on the same VM on different ports, and between two Pg instances on the same VM via unix sockets
– learned some new tools (terminator, anyone?)
– spread the \e love

There will be a followup to this lab, as we didn’t cover everything we wanted to, and (of course) created more questions for ourselves.

Thanks to everyone who attended for taking time to hang out inside on a sunny day, and to EDB and Emma for lunch and facilities!

Our next regular meeting will be Thursday Feb 20th; watch for the announcement next week.

PDXPUG: November meeting recap

Last week, Eric Hanson showed off Aquameta’s “Spacebase”. Neat stuff! I’m still trying to wrap my head around some of it. 🙂

Here are Eric’s slides and the pg_meta git repo. Watch for Aquameta’s release on pg-announce.

No meeting in December, as usual. Go to the Seventh Winter Coders’ Social instead.

We’ll be back in January. An exciting lineup for the first few months of next year is taking shape.

October meeting recap

What a great meeting last night! Garlynn Woodsong gave us a tour of Urban Footprint, a scenario planning tool for development modeling. Fascinating! Did you know that “walkability” of a neighborhood can be determined by the number of intersections per square mile? And I learned a new term, “airshed” (like watershed, not bikeshed).

The fun really started at the end of his talk, when Garlynn mentioned “We’re having slow queries sometimes, what settings should we tune?” This sparked a lively discussion and resulted in probably our longest meeting ever. Matt Smiley gave us several tips on using top, iostat, and sar to troubleshoot.

Here’s the general procedure we came up with:
– Make sure you have monitoring configured correctly (including the pg activity log) and a decent baseline established. At a minimum: server CPU, memory, I/O, network, log slow queries.
– If you have other apps running on the db server, verify that it’s actually the db that’s causing the bottleneck.
– Back up your configs before you tinker with them; version control is advised.
– Start here: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Performance_Optimization with the first link: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Tuning_Your_PostgreSQL_Server

Thanks to Iovation for hosting us and providing pizza!

Next month, new member Eric Hanson’s going to talk about how he uses Postgres at Aquameta. See you then!

September Meeting Recap + Upcoming Events

Last week’s meeting will go down in PDXPUG history alongside such classics as Normalization Puppet Theater and the ever-popular Relational Algebra Cocktail Parties.

I’d just returned from PgOpen[1], where I’d attended Andrew Dunstan’s talk about JSON in 9.3, which included an overview of the fun and very useful functions now available in Pg 9.3. Andrew Kreps’ talk for PDXPUG featured an app he’d whipped up using the Instagram API, specifically to show off those functions. The app is either the ultimate Photobomb-assist, or ultimate Presentation Karaoke feed. We’re still deciding how to use it, but the real takeaway for me was that there are probably a lot of people very unaware of the type of information they’re making publicly available via Instagram. Also, approximately half of the photos taken in Portland are of food, and probably 70% of those are Voodoo Doughnuts-related [2].

Upcoming events:
– PgConf.EU 29 Oct – 1 Nov 2013 in Dublin, Ireland
– SQLSaturday 16 Nov 2013 in Portland, OR
– CodeCamp 11 Jan 2014 in Portland, OR
– SCALE 21-23 Feb 2014 in LA
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1 – one of the lucky few to escape ORD on time
2 – these numbers are just SWAGs at this time; we’re waiting on the final statistical analysis.

PDXPUG: June meeting recap

We had a pretty good turnout for the lightning talks last week, despite competing with the OSBridge party.

Final talk lineup:
Gabrielle Roth: experiments with big .pgpass files
Mark Wong: updates to pg_top and pg_proctab
Ed Snajder: replication time trials*
Garlynn Woodsong: Urban Footprint
Jay R: Sieve of Eratosthenes
Mark Wong: teaser trailer for YAMS

After the talks, we compared licensing and costs of SQLServer, Oracle, and Postgres. Guess who’s winning.

Packt donated hard copies of PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance and the PostgreSQL 9 Admin Cookbook for us to give away. Thanks, Packt! Winners were chosen by a roll of a 30-sided die (aka rhombic triacontahedron) that Brian had knocking around in his pannier.

Our July meeting will be held during OSCON week. We’ll publish final details closer to the meeting date.

Thanks again to Iovation for hosting our meetings!

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* Ed blew away Selena’s previously held record of 6 minutes. Time for a rematch!