PostgreSQL 17 is in feature freeze. The expected release date is sometime this September.

We will review freely available presentations available on the internet to see what we can can expect in the next major release.

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

Please RSVP in the MeetUp link to help us gauge expected attendance. https://www.meetup.com/pdxpug/events/300096141/

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.

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.

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/).

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.

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/

PostgreSQL 15 was released on October 13, 2022 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.

We are using Meetup.com to distribute the link to the online meeting [1], which will be set shortly before the meeting as we will be using Jitsi [2]. Meetup does require you to RSVP to get access to the link. Jitsi can be used directly with Firefox and Chrome (with extension), or phones/tablets with the Jitsi Meet app.

Speaker: Paul Jungwirth

I'd like to present a couple patches I have in-progress for Postgres, the first to add a new type called "multiranges", and the second to add various SQL:2011 temporal database features: temporal primary & foreign keys, and temporal UPDATE and DELETE. I'll discuss what these features look like to users and also highlight some of the implementation details behind them.

[1] https://www.meetup.com/pdxpug/events/270062132/ [2] https://jitsi.org

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.

Speaker: Alex Theodore

As a CTO I saw everything that went into and came out of the web development process, from the "client needs" to the source-controlled code. But being skilled in database development showed me time and time again that databases (and their architecture) were often sidelined treated as after-thoughts and often times served as little more than flexible storage spaces. Yet, their contents were the very essence of value for the process/client/company being served. This strange inversion of priorities led me to develop a way of looking at databases as "outside" the application and ultimately to interacting with them as API's. In my talk I'll be presenting this concept and showing with simple rules and examples how it can be done.

Bio:

I was the product and technology founder of Fracture.me and CTO up until 2018 where I developed the manufacturing processes and ERP software that powered our production process. That got me deeply involved in database work, especially with architecture and process design and optimization. Now I work part time as a database consultant and part time building modern, minimalistic furniture for my new (small) company MillFinish.com.

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.

This month I am going to be talking about my current work on sharding large mysql databases with Vitess. My team has been on a journey towards splitting our largest mysql databases and I want to share my experiences and lessons learned. We are going to look at the problems and possible solutions to scaling reads and writes in relational databases.

Vitess is an open source project born at youtube to scale their largest and most critical databases. It has been adopted in as a Cloud Native Compute Foundation incubator project. With PostgreSQL on the medium-term road map, let’s take a look at what we have been able to do with mysql.

Hi its me Grant. I work on the database engineering team at New Relic. I’ve been using Postgres in production since 9.2. I co-organize the Postgres user group in Portland with Mark Wong.

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.

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.

Learn about the considerations in planning for disaster recovery in order to maintain business continuity. There are solutions available that can help you achieve your backup and recovery objectives by taking advantage of PostgreSQL features, such as point-in-time recovery, and help implement retention policies.

Also learn how to take advantage of PostgreSQL’s replication features to keep your database highly-available, and the basic cluster architectures to consider to keep a PostgreSQL cluster up and running.

Mark works at 2ndQuadrant as a consultant for English Speaking Territories, based out of Oregon. He is a Contributor to PostgreSQL, co-organizer of the Portland PostgreSQL User Group, and serves as a Director and Treasurer for the United States PostgreSQL Association.

Speaker: Grant Holly

This month I will be demonstrating using non-blocking IO database access using Scala and the Slick library. No really, the library is called Slick AND it is very cool to use. Slick and Scala are great for working with Postgres with either straight SQL, or using the FRM (that’s a Functional Relation Mapper like in functional programming). After Hannah gave a great talk talk about Python, Postgres, and ORMs, I got to thinking that I could do a language and ORM talk. Thanks Hannah, that was great.

https://github.com/grantholly/pdx_pug_scala_and_pg

Hi, it’s me still Grant. I work at New Relic as an engineer on the database engineering team. I’ve been using Postgres in production since 9.2 and have been using and enjoying Scala for about two years having worked on a couple of production high throughput applications.

Speaker: Hannah Stepanek

Let’s talk databases in python! What’s an ORM? Is there a way to write database queries so that they are compatible with multiple types of databases? How do you make database changes (such as adding a new table or a new column) safely? What is a connection pool and why is it useful? What are some things that can go wrong when operating at scale? In this talk we’ll take a deep dive into how the python libraries sqlalchemy and alembic make managing production databases simple, efficient, and painless so you can get back to feature development.

Hannah has been working in industry for over 6 years as a python software engineer. She currently works at Hypothesis, a web application for annotating web pages and pdfs. In her spare time she enjoys riding her horse Sophie and playing board games.

Temporal databases let you record history: either a history of the database (what the table used to say), a history of the thing itself (what it used to be), or both at once. The theory of temporal databases goes back to the 90s, but standardization has only just begun with some modest recommendations in SQL:2011, and database products (including Postgres) are still missing major functionality.

This talk will cover how temporal tables are structured, how they are queried and updated, what SQL:2011 offers (and doesn't), what functionality Postgres has already, and what remains to be built.

Paul started programming on a Tandy 1000 at age 8 and hasn't been able to stop since. He helped build one of the Mac's first web servers in 1994 and has founded software companies in politics and technical hiring. He works as an independent consultant specializing in Rails, Postgres, and Chef.

Note new location and we are meeting the 4th Thursday this month!

pdxpug.wordpress.com

BDR (bi-directional replication) enables asynchronous multi-master replication in Postgres as an extension and has been in full production status since 2014. We will discuss the use cases that BDR is most appropriate for, and where is might not be best suited.

Mark works at 2ndQuadrant as a consultant for English Speaking Territories, based out of Oregon. He is a Contributor to PostgreSQL, co-organizer of the Portland PostgreSQL User Group, and serves as a Director and Treasurer for the United States PostgreSQL Association.

The Portland PostgreSQL Users Group (PDXPUG), Portland State University Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, and Datalab, the PSU Data and Information Management Laboratory and is proud to present a day of presentations about PostgreSQL, an open source relational database management system.

Stored procedure support is coming to PostgreSQL 11. Come hear about what a stored procedure is and how it differs from the existing user-defined functions.

Presented by: Dr. Kristin Tufte

This talk will describe work in Smart Cities in the Portland region. We’ll begin with the framework and motivation for the Smart Cities work and the question What is a Smart City? We’ll discuss Portland’s approach to Smart Cities, provide some historical context and then give an overview of ongoing Smart Cities projects including work on AV policy, the Portland Urban Data Lake, new sensors and earthquake resilience. The goal of the talk is to give the audience an overview of the work being done in Portland to bring a human face to data and technology and to inspire question and discussion.

Dr. Tufte is actively involved in Portland’s Smart Cities work and was the data lead on the City of Portland’s Smart Cities proposal. Dr. Tufte has collaborated closely with transportation agencies in the Portland-Vancouver area for the past ten years and directs PORTAL — the regional transportation data archive. Dr. Tufte is a member of the Transportation Research Board’s Urban Data Committee, co-chairing its Urban Big Data subcommittee and Portland Global Cities Team Challenge Action Cluster. Dr. Tufte has a PhD in Database Management from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Dr. Tufte’s passion is using data and technology to change people’s lives, especially those in traditionally underserved communities.

Want automated high availability PostgreSQL without relying on someone else's cloud service? It's possible today, and easier than you think; we just need a little container orchestration pixiedust, and your DBAs can take the weekend off.

Josh Berkus will explain the current state of HA Postgres services on Kubernetes/OpenShift, introducing the several projects in this area, and then going into a deep dive on Patroni/Spilo. He'll bring you up to date on the new "Kube-native" Patroni, and work expected in the future. With live demos!

Josh Berkus helps manage the Kubernetes community for Red Hat. He is a "hacker emeritus" for PostgreSQL. He lives in NE Portland with a large black cat, a pottery studio, and a librarian.

Portland Postgres Users Group See website for details.

Portland Postgres Users Group See website for details.

Portland Postgres Users Group See website for details.

Portland Postgres Users Group

This month, come visit us at the Postgres booth in the PyCon Expo Hall.

https://us.pycon.org/2016/events/reception/

Portland Postgres Users Group See website for details.

This month we're having an introduction to PostGIS!

Portland Postgres Users Group See website for details.