Location-based services are all the rage these days, and almost everyone has a latitude and longitude or two stashed away in a numeric column somewhere. But, there is so much more to it than just a point. Once relegated to government and academia, geographic information systems are becoming increasingly visible. With the PostGIS extension, PostgreSQL is a first-class geodatabase and an incredible platform for working with spatial data, but what is PostGIS and why would one use it? And beyond PostGIS there are a dizzying array of tools to load, visualize and interact with the wonderful geospatial information in your database. This talk will cover GIS and PostGIS basics and provide an introduction to geodatabases and spatial queries.

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Edwin Knuth spent quite some time as a sysadmin and web developer before going back to school to study Environmental Science at the University of Alaska Southeast. He quickly became fascinated with Geographic Information Systems and realized that GIS was just a really neat database application. In Alaska, Edwin worked on several unique projects, including building bat detectors and using PostGIS to manage a wireless sensor network on the Juneau Icefield. He has lived in Portland for the past year and loves it very much.

Then a trip to the Lucky Lab after.

What: All-day PostgreSQL one-track mini-conference When: Sunday, July 20th, 9am to 5pm, possible party afterwards Who: PDXPUG will select speakers Where: Portland Convention Center, Portland, Oregon

This month's topic is "Data Visualization and Exploration Techniques Using R and Postgres" with PSU's Dr Christopher Monsere.

Full details: http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/1669

Normally, Gabrielle ensures that we have thoughtful and informative presentations. Unfortunately for you, I -- Melissa -- am guest-hosting this month.

What I'll come up with is anyone's guess, but BYOB is strongly recommended. Muahahaha.

Oh, and we may also talk about Postgres or something. And we'll join those folks at the Lucky Lab afterwards.

Jonathan Leto will be talking about "PL/Parrot and PL/Perl6 - Parrots and Butterflies in your Database".

Beer afterwards at the SE Lucky Lab.

Brian Kurle will be giving a talk about his experiences on architecting and developing a middleware system for Decagon Devices that collects data from remote devices via GSM and provides aggregated data via the web to users with PostgreSQL as the central database.

Looking forward to seeing everyone there....and of course, drinks at the Lucky Lab (http://www.luckylab.com/ ) at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. afterward.

Join the Portland PostgreSQL Users' Group for our monthly meeting!

When: 7pm Thursday, May 20 Where: FreeGeek Who: Melissa Hollingsworth What: Normalization!

Drinks afterward at the SE Lucky Lab.

PDXPUG monthly meeting.

Where: FreeGeek When: 7pm 18 Mar, 2010 Who: you! What: PostgreSQL 9.0alpha testing party

Drinks afterward at the SE Lucky Lab.

Over Normalization from a developers point of view.

Ben Hengst works for Powells.com and has been involved in some in house restructuring, mostly centered around moving to a very vertical structure. This talk will revolve around what works and what doesn't, code and people problems that have been encountered and how to dig your self out.

Looking forward to seeing everyone there....and of course, drinks at the Lucky Lab (http://www.luckylab.com/ ) at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. afterwards.

PDXPUG monthly meeting.

Where: FreeGeek When: 7pm 17 Sept, 2009 Who: David Wheeler What: Unit Test Your Database!

Drinks afterward at the SE Lucky Lab.

Join the Portland PostgreSQL Users' Group for our monthly meeting!

Where: FreeGeek When: 7pm 20 August, 2009 Who: Jim Cser What: Metro simulation database

Drinks afterward at the SE Lucky Lab.

PostgreSQL Users' Group monthly meeting. Followed by refreshments at the Lucky Lab.

Topic: Visual Planner Presenter: Tom Raney, PSU Where: FreeGeek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR When: 7pm, September 18, 2008

Tom Raney will be presenting the Visual Planner, a GUI tool written in Java that enables the user to peek inside the PostgreSQL planner's decision making process. The tool shows all plans that were evaluated including the plan that was picked for execution. Tom worked on this during Google Summer of Code, and credits Dr. Len Shapiro, a professor at Portland State University and PDXPUG regular, as a great help.

Tom showed off his tool during OSCON and has gotten some feedback from community members on it. He's working up a test example that should appeal to DBAs, and I'll link directly to the source code once he's got it ready.

This work also involves a patch to PostgreSQL, which should be available soon!

After the meeting, retire to the Lucky Lab for refreshments!

Join the Portland PostgreSQL Users' Group for our monthly meeting!

When: 7pm Thursday, May 20 Where: FreeGeek Who: Mark & gabrielle What: What's new in 9.0

Drinks afterward at the SE Lucky Lab.

Monthly meeting of the Portland PostgreSQL Users' Group.

Chris May will be speaking.

Looking forward to seeing everyone there...and of course, drinks at the Lucky Lab (http://www.luckylab.com/ ) at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. afterwards.

The Portland PostgreSQL Users Group (PDXPUG)

John Naylor will be talking about his experience in Florida as a data manager for President Obama's 2008 campaign. He will discuss the role of data in political campaigns, and also refactor some data warehouse queries. Donuts and bacon provided.

Refreshments will be partaken at the Lucky Labrador Pub in SE Portland afterward.

Webb Sprague will be speaking about PostGIS and the Census Data at the next PDXPUG meeting at FreeGeek (at 7:00pm - 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR).

Looking forward to seeing everyone there....and of course, drinks at the Lucky Lab http://www.luckylab.com/ ) at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. afterwards.

More details from Webb:

If anyone is wondering about specifics, I will describe how I recently created a "crosswalk" table that correlates census tracts in 1980 with census tracts in 2000 in the Portland region (well, Washington, Multnomah, and Clackamas counties), so that we could see poverty trends over the last 25 years.

I used PostGIS, Census naming conventions ("FIPS codes"), and lots of outer joins. So if you like that sort of thing, I would love to hear your comments tomorrow!

Come join us for an evening of Pythoneering with Jason Kirtland, a key force behind the Portland Python Interest Group - http://wiki.python.org/moin/PortlandPythonUserGroup. They are having Lightning Talks tomorrow night at Cubespace.

Jackson will discuss the basics of GIS, and the current environment in which enterprise spatial analytics are performed. Considering the many pitfalls of this current system, he will discuss how FOSS tools – especially PostgreSQL/PostGIS – are vitally important for modern spatial analytics. In addition to the PostGIS extension, Jackson will talk about network routing using the PgRouting extension and the interface between R and PostgreSQL. This talk will act more as a showcase of GIS and “spatial SQL” within PostgreSQL than it will nitty-gritty database development.

Jackson Voelkel is a Health Data Analyst on Kaiser Permanente’s GIS Team as well as an Adjunct Professor of Geography at Portland State University. He focuses on developing infrastructure for and performing advanced spatial analytics across healthcare, environment, urban planning, utilities, and econometrics. He teaches courses on advanced spatial analytics in R as well as spatial database design with PostgreSQL/PostGIS.

Speakers: Gabrielle Roth & Michelle Franz

In February, long-term PDXPUGers Michelle Franz & Gabrielle Roth return to discuss DBLINK and FDW, two methods of accessing data that’s outside your database. We’ll briefly mention SQL/MED on the way, and tell a couple of bad (Dad) jokes.

We’ll cover use (and mis-use) cases, configuration of each, and interesting quirks. Gabrielle will attempt a live demo of file_fdw and postgres_fdw. You’re welcome to follow along if you’d like, just show up with a couple of Pg databases: they can be on the same cluster (or container or RDS instance or what have you) or different ones, doesn’t really matter. One of them should have at least one table with data in it.

About the speakers:

From embedded systems to UI to relational database programming, Michelle’s running an interesting path through the software world. Working with databases is her current episode, with some programming, some DBA, some SysAdmin and a healthy dose of learning agile. She’s very quickly come to appreciate and enjoy working with Postgres and her work has allowed her to learn from some super talented database experts.

Gabrielle has been using Postgres since sometime in the version 7s, and thinks that the best part of using Open Source software is the culture of sharing knowledge. She’s a Senior Data Engineer at NS1 and co-founder and former co-lead of PDXPUG.

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”.

We will also have zoom link available closer to the presentation date if you want to attend remotely. Sign up on MeetUp for this notification: https://www.meetup.com/pdxpug/events/293519969/

Speaker: Will McLean

To follow the presentations on accessing Postgres from Python and Scala, I will lead a discussion on accessing Postgres with Java. I'll start with a jdbc tutorial and finish with adding data access to a springboot webapp.

I have twenty years experience in e-commerce applications, the last eight here in Portland, mostly at Nike.For the last few years everything has been moving to Amazon RDS Postgres, that's a trend pdxpug can get behind! I am currently working for Navis on CRM applications for the hospitality industry.

Even though PG Con West will be going on October 10-12 in sunny (hopefully) Portland, we will still have our monthly meeting on October 16, 2008. This month, Selena Deckelmann will provide a tutorial on setting up Point-in-time recovery for your PostgreSQL installation. This will be hands on, with the ever-dangerous LIVE DEMO.

We will be meeting at FreeGeek - 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR.

In November, our own Randal Schwartz of Stonehenge Consulting (http://www.stonehenge.com/) will be giving a talk on Smalltalk and Postgres integration.

Looking forward to seeing everyone there....and of course, drinks at the Lucky Lab (http://www.luckylab.com/ ) at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. afterwards.

pg_top was born in 2007 from a fork of the unixtop, a terminal program displaying top processes on the system, where pg_top focuses on the processes with the PostgreSQL database you are connected to. Recently pg_systat was forked from systat to display additional database statistics.

These tools have can help do more such as explore query execution plans and create reports from system and database resources.

Come learn about the statistics PostgreSQL keeps and how to use these tools to view them.

Mark leads the 2ndQuadrant performance practice as a Performance Consultant for English Speaking Territories, based out of Oregon in the USA. He is a long time Contributor to PostgreSQL, co-organizer of the Portland PostgreSQL User Group, and serves as a Director and Treasurer for the United States PostgreSQL Association.

Tim Bruce will be speaking at the next PDXPUG meeting at FreeGeek (at 7:00pm - 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR).

An Introduction to Managing and Troubleshooting PostgreSQL on Windows

This talk will be for entry-level to mid-level Windows Administrators who have to support PostgreSQL on Windows (Windows Server or Windows Desktops). I'll touch on managing the service(s) and checking the Windows logs, as well as some quick ways to look for performance of the Operating System and PostgreSQL with the built-in tools on Microsoft Windows.

Tim Bruce is a Database Administrator for Fiserv Enterprise Technology. He is spread between Microsoft SQL Server on Windows and PostgreSQL running on SuSE Linux. In his spare time, he supports several Emergency Service organizations including the Washington County Composite Squadron of the Civil Air Patrol.

Looking forward to seeing everyone there....and of course, drinks at the Lucky Lab (http://www.luckylab.com/ ) at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. afterward.

Portland Postgres Users Group See website for details.

Portland Postgres Users Group See website for details.