Join us for the second annual PostgreSQL Conference West! Scheduled to begin October 10 and go through the weekend, West being held at Portland State University is going to be the destination for learning, fun and general education about PostgreSQL.

2nd THURSDAY OF EACH MONTH, BEGINNING JANUARY 8, 7:00 PM PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY, 1900 SW 4th AVENUE, FOURTH AVENUE BUILDING – ROOM 86-01

See website for more details.

Monthly meeting of the Portland PostgreSQL Users' Group.

Ed Borasky will be speaking about Data Visualization.

Beers after at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne.

Monthly meeting of the Portland PostgreSQL Users' Group.

Kristin Tufte will be speaking about the Portland Transportation Archive Listing (PORTAL) database schema.

Beers after at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne.

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.

by Len Shapiro

Abstract: I'll survey how I teach the introductory database course at PSU. My goal for the talk is to elicit suggestions for how I could do a better job. The theme of the course is "transforming data into Information". I use a 200 Meg database, hosted on PostgreSQL, instead of the one-slide databases used in typical intro courses, to illustrate the principles of the course. The database is Federal Elections Commission data re donations to candidates, so queries often reflect real questions about the real data.

Bio: Len Shapiro has been a professor at PSU for 23 years. His research interests are primarily in query processing.

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!

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.

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.

PDXPUG monthly meeting.

Where: FreeGeek When: 7pm 15 Oct, 2009 Who: Selena Deckelmann What: Bucardo: Replication with tiny little goats

Drinks afterward at the SE Lucky Lab.

PDXPUG monthly meeting.

Where: FreeGeek When: 7pm 19 Nov, 2009 Who: Dan Colish What: Materialized Views (with cupcakes)

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 18 Mar, 2010 Who: you! What: PostgreSQL 9.0alpha testing party

Drinks afterward at the SE Lucky Lab.

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.

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.

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.

--

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.

PDXPUG monthly meeting.

Where: FreeGeek When: 7pm 21 Oct, 2010 Who: Aurynn Shaw What: PostgreSQL and node.js

Postgres and Node.js, a powerful event-driven programming environment paired with our favourite open-source database, now together in the same great package! Aurynn will be going over the node.js environment, how it differs from other programming environments, and how to use postgres with node.

Aurynn Shaw is Lead Userspace Developer at Command Prompt, Inc. She has come all the way from another country to present this talk, so don't miss it!

Beer afterwards at the Lucky Lab.

See you there!

Selena Deckelmann will be talking about managing terabyte instances of PostgreSQL.

This will be a preview of her MySQL Users Conference talk:

http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2011/public/schedule/detail/17195

Size can creep up on you. Some day you may wake up to a multi-terabyte Postgres system handling over 3000 tps staring you down. Learn the best ways to manage these systems as they grow, and find out what new features in 9.0 have made life easier for administrators and application developers working with big data.

This talk will lead you through solutions to problems Postgres faces when it gets big: backups, transaction wraparound, bloat, huge catalogs and upgrades. You need to monitor the right things, find the gems in DBA-friendly database functions and catalog tables, and know the right places to look to spot problems early. We’ll also go over monitoring best practices and open source tools to get the job done.

Working with multiple versions of Postgres back to version 8.2 will be included, and as well as tips on making the most out of new features in 9.0. War stories will be taken from real-world work with Emma, an email marketing company with a few large databases.

See http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/1660 for talk description.

This month's meeting marks the fourth installment in our "Founders Series"..

When: 7-9pm Thu Apr 21, 2011 Where: FreeGeek Who: David Wheeler What: Distributing Extensions on PGXN

So you've solved a common problem in PostgreSQL, a serious pain point that lots of other people could take advantage of. You want to open-source the code, and would like to package it up and distribute it where people can find it, read its docs, and download and install it.

The newest destination for distributing PostgreSQL extensions is PGXN, the PostgreSQL Extension network. PGXN offers a central index of PostgreSQL extensions and their documentation, making it easy for people to find an install extensions.

How do you optimize your extension distribution for maximum PGXN exposure? By careful packaging, thorough documentation, and simple installation. Join me for an overview of how best to achieve that — including how to build extensions compatible with PostgreSQL 9.1's improved extension support.

David Wheeler is an associate at PGExperts, and is responsible for PGXN, the PostgreSQL Extension Network) and pgTAP. He's into testing and extension distribution.

Beer afterwards at the Lucky Lab. See you there!

Coming to OSCON? Be sure to come a day early and join us for another PgDay! This summer marks PDXPUG's 5th anniversary, and we want to see your smiling face! We will be celebrating at Gotham Tavern after the day of sessions. Sign up for sessions and afterparty here: http://bit.ly/f1F2Mz .

Yes, it's ok to show up just for the afternoon (or the party) if your flight arrives on Sunday.

We'd like a $30 donation to SPI for the sessions, but don't let lack of funds deter you from attending.

When: 7-9pm Thu Sep 15, 2011 Where: FreeGeek Who: Joshua Drake What: Practical PostgreSQL Performance

This presentation provides down tot 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!

When: 7-9pm Thu Oct 20, 2011 Where: Iovation Who: Brent Dombrowski What: Upgrading PostGIS from 8.something to 9.0

See PDXPUG blog (linked) for details.

See PDXPUG blog (linked) for details.

See PDXPUG blog (linked) for details.

See PDXPUG blog (linked) for details.

See PDXPUG blog (linked) for details. Also, "beware the Ides of March", &c.

See PDXPUG blog (linked) for details.

See PDXPUG blog (linked) for details.

See PDXPUG blog (linked) for details.

See PDXPUG blog (linked) for details.

See PDXPUG blog (linked) for details.

Sqitch information is at http://sqitch.org/

See PDXPUG blog (linked) for details.

See PDXPUG blog (linked) for details.

See PDXPUG blog (linked) for details.

Autovacuum’s like a Roomba, right? You just turn it on and it does all the work for you. Well, not quite – for one, your pets can’t ride around on it – and occasionally it may get stuck in a (figurative) corner. In this talk, we’ll discuss vacuum, analyze, and their daemonic counterparts: how to adjust them to perform appropriately*, and perhaps more importantly, what the heck are they actually doing?

This is a beginner-to-intermediate level talk, but you will learn something new about vacuuming, regardless.** –

Gabrielle Roth is a consultant with EnterpriseDB. She specializes in network, database, and system monitoring, as well as abusing SQL.

–

After-meeting beer location: Huber’s, the oldest bar in Portland. See you there!

See link for details.

See link for details.

See link for details.

We have some special out-of-town guests here for OSCON, so we're having a special meeting for July. Details will be posted on the pdxpug website: http://wp.me/p25MlK-4r

Note that this is not our regular meeting time, day, or location!

See link for details.

See link for details.

Portland Postgres Users Group. See link for details.

Portland Postgres Users Group. See link for details.

Portland Postgres Users Group. See link for details.

See web link for details.

Advanced signup is required.

Portland Postgres Users Group. See link for details.

Portland Postgres Users Group. See link for details.

Portland Postgres Users Group. See link for details.

Portland Postgres Users Group. See link for details.

Portland Postgres Users Group. See link for details.

Portland Postgres Users Group. See link for details.

Note that this is not our regular meeting time or place!

Portland Postgres Users Group. See link for details.

Saturday, September 6th, is PostgreSQL Day, co-hosted by the Portland Postgres Users Group (PDXPUG) and Portland State University. Attendance is free, but RSVP is required (link below)

Place: Portland State University, Engineering Building, Room EB 102, 1930 SW 4th Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97201.

Registration: Space is limited, please RSVP!

RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/portland-postgresql-users-group-pdxpug-day-2014-tickets-11916561757

Food: Light snacks & beverages provided. Breakfast and lunch is on your own; food carts are nearby.

Presentations: Organizers are looking for presenters for PostgreSQL Day. Talks should be about 45 minutes in length, and about any of the following topics:

PostgreSQL administration and performance Case studies of interesting uses of PostgreSQL and PostGIS Interesting applications built on PostGIS or PostgreSQL Database and/or geographic application development Database-related DevOps SQL and stored procedure programming New Postgres/PostGIS features and hacking Postgres/PostGIS

Organizers will also be taking lightning talks of 5 minutes each, on similar topics. Email your talk proposal to Mark Wong at markwkm -at- postgresql.org.

Portland Postgres Users Group. See link for details.

When: 7-9pm Thu Sep 18, 2014 Where: Iovation Who: Jay Riddle What: Using Postgresql to enable Google like Search

Jay’s been experimenting with Pg’s full text search capabilities. At our next meeting, he’ll cover the following: * Brief intro on why Google like search capabilities are fun. * Introduce Postgresql full text abilities. Discuss at a high level why a full text index may be a bit heavier than a normal index. * Look at possible solutions for use cases where the data you want to index is spread across multiple columns and multiple tables.

Jay Riddle is a database administrator at Viewpoint software.

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!

Elevators open at 6:45 and building security closes access to the floor at 7:30.

The building is on the Green & Yellow Max lines. Underground bike parking is available in the parking garage; outdoors all around the block in the usual spots.

See you there!

What: PgOpen Recap (gabrielle, Mark, John M); New Relic Instrumentation of Pg Queries (Andrew)

Please note the new earlier meeting time! We’ll try this over the winter.

Two topics this month: PgOpen attendees will discuss highlights of that conference, and Andrew will talk about some New Relic-y stuff.

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!

Elevators open at 5:45 and building security closes access to the floor at 6:30.

See website for details.

See website for details.

When: 6-8pm Thu Jan 15, 2015 Where: Iovation Who: Gabrielle Roth What: RDS Postgres

Amazon integrated Postgres into their general Relational Database Services (RDS) offerings July 1, 2014. RDS offers automatic failover, scalability, and easy configuration, plus Amazon handles all the patching and upgrades for you! Their SDK supports many languages and includes a robust CLI, if you want to automate management of your deployments. They also support several popular Postgres extensions.

Of course, since it’s a managed service, you can’t do everything you might expect or want to. In this talk, I’ll discuss the fun, the quirky, and the downright maddening features I’ve discovered working with production RDS deployments. Come find out what it’s like to use RDS Postgres day-to-day.

The building is on the Green & Yellow Max lines. Underground bike parking is available in the parking garage; outdoors all around the block in the usual spots.

We’ll go to Huber’s for after-meeting socializing.

See you there!

When: 6-8pm Thu Feb 19, 2015
Where: Iovation
Who: David Kerr
What: Using Bucardo to Migrate your Pg database to RDS with minimal downtime

As a followup to January’s RDS discussion, Dave Kerr works through strategies to move your existing Postgres database into RDS.

Using Bucardo and Master/Master Replication we can achieve a migration to RDS with minimal or no downtime.

Dave will show some tools and techniques so help facilitate this transition as well as go over the idiosyncrasies of using Bucardo with RDS.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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