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

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 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.

While many people may know Randal Schwartz of Stonehenge Consulting (http://www.stonehenge.com/) from his talks and papers on Perl, he is also quite knowledgeable about Smalltalk and will be giving a talk on Smalltalk and Postgres integration.

We will be meeting Thursday, November 20th, 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.

PostgreSQL Portland Performance Practice Project (P5)

Sponsored by the Computer Science Department, Portland State University

This series will consist of 5 to 6 presentations aimed at PostgreSQL database users who wish to learn more about tuning their systems for performance. Attendees will learn how to generate and interpret operating system (Linux) and database statistics, and the effects of some system tuning techniques. This involves studying the well known Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) benchmark called TPC-C ( www.tpc.org ). TPC-C was developed by a committee, representing all major players in the database marketplace, to be representative of typical online enterprise databases. TPC-C consists of a precisely defined schema and 19 queries. We will review the schema and queries and demonstrate how each tuning technique affects their performance. We will use an open source package that the speaker has developed, called DBT-2, which many DBAs have found useful.

Mark Wong has an MS in Computer Science from OGI and several years of experience developing and executing various database systems benchmarks. Most relevant to this series are his years spent at the OSDL developing and using a fair-use derivative of the TPC-C benchmark to characterize system performance of open source software. He now works at HP StorageWorks on their NAS products.

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

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.

Sponsored by the Computer Science Department, Portland State University

This series will consist of 5 to 6 presentations aimed at PostgreSQL database users who wish to learn more about tuning their systems for performance. Attendees will learn how to generate and interpret operating system (Linux) and database statistics, and the effects of some system tuning techniques. This involves studying the well known Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) benchmark called TPC-C ( www.tpc.org ). TPC-C was developed by a committee, representing all major players in the database marketplace, to be representative of typical online enterprise databases. TPC-C consists of a precisely defined schema and 19 queries. We will review the schema and queries and demonstrate how each tuning technique affects their performance. We will use an open source package that the speaker has developed, called DBT-2, which many DBAs have found useful.

PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY, 1900 SW 4th AVENUE, FOURTH AVENUE BUILDING – ROOM 86-01

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.

PostgreSQL Portland Performance Practice Project (P5)

Sponsored by the Computer Science Department, Portland State University

This series will consist of 5 to 6 presentations aimed at PostgreSQL database users who wish to learn more about tuning their systems for performance. Attendees will learn how to generate and interpret operating system (Linux) and database statistics, and the effects of some system tuning techniques. This involves studying the well known Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) benchmark called TPC-C ( www.tpc.org ). TPC-C was developed by a committee, representing all major players in the database marketplace, to be representative of typical online enterprise databases. TPC-C consists of a precisely defined schema and 19 queries. We will review the schema and queries and demonstrate how each tuning technique affects their performance. We will use an open source package that the speaker has developed, called DBT-2, which many DBAs have found useful.

Mark Wong has an MS in Computer Science from OGI and several years of experience developing and executing various database systems benchmarks. Most relevant to this series are his years spent at the OSDL developing and using a fair-use derivative of the TPC-C benchmark to characterize system performance of open source software.

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

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.

This session will survey a few PostgreSQL tuning parameters and their effects on the OLTP workload DBT-2.

--

PostgreSQL Portland Performance Practice Project (P5)

Sponsored by the Computer Science Department, Portland State University

This series will consist of 5 to 6 presentations aimed at PostgreSQL database users who wish to learn more about tuning their systems for performance. Attendees will learn how to generate and interpret operating system (Linux) and database statistics, and the effects of some system tuning techniques. This involves studying the well known Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) benchmark called TPC-C ( www.tpc.org ). TPC-C was developed by a committee, representing all major players in the database marketplace, to be representative of typical online enterprise databases. TPC-C consists of a precisely defined schema and 19 queries. We will review the schema and queries and demonstrate how each tuning technique affects their performance. We will use an open source package that the speaker has developed, called DBT-2, which many DBAs have found useful.

Mark Wong has an MS in Computer Science from OGI and several years of experience developing and executing various database systems benchmarks. Most relevant to this series are his years spent at the OSDL developing and using a fair-use derivative of the TPC-C benchmark to characterize system performance of open source software.

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

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.

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.

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.

In early 2009, several developers from Relevance and Viget Labs got together and starting talking about technical conferences. As we discussed our past experiences at regional, national, and international events, we began to realize something: large conferences are wonderful for a lot of things, but we wanted something that met a different set of goals. We came up with Developer Day, which was designed to:

• Build lasting relationships among local peers
• Bridge distinct technical communities

After a year of Developer Days, however, we decided a new look was in order, and thus was born DevNation. We've still got the same ideals, but we feel that the DevNation name better reflects that vision (and it's easier to Google!)

Relationships

The general pattern for a large conference runs something like this: you fly to a city, go to the event, have a great time, meet lots of great people, and fly home. More often than not, you don't see those people again until the next big conference, and that's a problem. We wanted our event to be different, so it's intentionally local. Speakers and attendees are overwhelmingly local to the conference, so when you meet someone doing something cool, you can connect with them a week later for lunch without a problem.

Technology-Agnostic

Sure, there are events that draw a wide range of developers (e.g., OSCON), but even then people tend to segregate; the Pythonists go to their sessions, the Rubyists to theirs, and the PHP devs to theirs. By having only one track, we give everyone the opportunity to see what's happening in other communities.

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.

Rob Wultsch, a recent addition to Facebook's Database Operations team, will compare and contrast the Facebook deployment with his previous work with another large deployment of open source databases. In this db-agnostic talk, he'll go over: the bizarre becoming ordinary, the many types of infrastructure that do not scale and what does and does not work when building a DBA team.

Before joining Facebook, Rob worked for a very large hosting company as a database administrator and a newspaper as a web developer. In his free time he enjoys riding his motorcycle and bicycle and fantasizes about moving to Portland.

As always, beer afterwards at the Lucky Lab. See you there!

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.

speaker: David Wheeler

SQL change management is hard. Most “migration”-style implementations require opaque naming conventions, prefer DSLs that cover a fraction of SQL, and require duplication of code for simple changes to existing functions. Such does not have to be. And now it’s not

Introducing Sqitch, simple SQL change management that doesn’t suck. Sqitch doesn’t care what programming language your app is written in. It has no opinions as to what database to use or what its schema should look like. And it doesn’t require sequentially-named migration scripts or the use of any DSL other than SQL. Sqitch lets you to write SQL migration scripts that target your database, and provides a simple, unintrusive interface for specifying dependencies, so that it can run things in the proper order.

So come to this talk to learn all about Sqitch: How it works, where to get it, and how to get the most out of managing database deployments.

David Wheeler is Senior Data Architect at iovation and an associate at PGExperts. He is responsible, among other things, for PGXN, pgTAP, DesignScene, and way too many CPAN modules. He lives in Portland unless he’s traveling with his family.

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

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.

Portland Postgres Users Group. See link for details.

The Rentrak Hackathon is a gathering of laptops and laughter. Classically, we all sit in a square and type words onto a keyboard that then get turned into a "computerized program". It's a good chance to work on your personal projects, learn what your peers are up to (computer-wise), figure out what the best programming language is, and/or say the words "I don't have anything to work on" or "I forgot my laptop". This event is very informal, and there is no specific project we'll be focusing our efforts on.

Food and refreshments are served. RSVPing to [email protected] is appreciated, but not required.

Come check out Rentrak's new downtown office. Everyone is welcome to join us!

Portland Postgres Users Group. See link for details.

Tonight at MaptimeStJohns, we will review some compiled leaflet maps using several of the leaflet pluggins. We will go through some live custom examples using humangeo's dvf pluggin, we will use postgis and output geojson, geocsv and topojson to add to our leaflet maps, and also discuss some temporal mapping tools.

Bring your laptop with leaflet installed and a webserver available. Have a server scripting language such as php or python and postgressql/postgis installed. If you don't have a laptop, come anyway and you will be able to see these tools in action, as well as receive any materials handed out at the meetup. Bring a flash drive so you can take a copy of the data home.

LET'S GET TOGETHER AND MAP AT MAPTIMESTJOHNS!

The Rentrak Hackathon is a gathering of laptops and laughter. Classically, we all sit in a square and type words onto a keyboard that then get turned into a "computerized program". It's a good chance to work on your personal projects, learn what your peers are up to (computer-wise), figure out what the best programming language is, and/or say the words "I don't have anything to work on" or "I forgot my laptop". This event is very informal, and there is no specific project we'll be focusing our efforts on.

Food and refreshments are served. RSVPing to [email protected] is appreciated, but not required.

Come check out Rentrak's new downtown office. Everyone is welcome to join us!

Portland Postgres Users Group. See link for details.

The Rentrak Hackathon is a gathering of laptops and laughter. Classically, we all sit in a square and type words onto a keyboard that then get turned into a "computerized program". It's a good chance to work on your personal projects, learn what your peers are up to (computer-wise), figure out what the best programming language is, and/or say the words "I don't have anything to work on" or "I forgot my laptop". This event is very informal, and there is no specific project we'll be focusing our efforts on.

Food and refreshments are served. RSVPing to [email protected] is appreciated, but not required.

Come check out Rentrak's new downtown office. Everyone is welcome to join us!

What Beginners Teach Us

Check out our pre-event Q&A with Selena on the New Relic blog.

Open source as an idea has won. Linux dominates developer servers, open source tools are ubiquitous and being an open source developer rocks. And yet, we talk frequently about how to find new contributors, how to increase the number of people who participate and share code with us, how to improve the skills of the junior developers and hire them as fast as we can.

Selena has spent a considerable amount of time teaching absolute beginners how to program in Python, how to use the command-line and how to use revision control. These beginners succeed and fail in open source in both familiar and surprising ways. In this talk, she will share lessons from their experiences to help us create a more inclusive and welcoming future for open source software. Further, she will provide insights into the code review process, and how learning how to give code review (not just receive code review) is critical to becoming an expert developer.

This is the 7th event in a series of free monthly FutureTalks from disruptive Developers, innovative Technologists and world-changing Creatives. Networking begins at 5:30, with free food and drinks. The presentation will begin right at 6p.

Please RSVP via Eventbrite HERE

Selena is a major contributor to PostgreSQL and a data architect at Mozilla. She's been involved with free and open source software since 1995 and began running conferences for PostgreSQL in 2007. She founded Open Source Bridge, Postgres Open and speaks internationally about open source, databases and community. She is an advisor to the Ada Initiative, an organization dedicated to increasing the participation of women in open source and technology communities.

You can find her on Twitter @selenamarie and on her blog at chesnok.com

› FutureTalk is brought to you by New Relic in collaboration with TAO

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!

Come join us for Pythonic talks!

All levels are welcome! Talk levels vary from beginner to advanced.

This month:

• Omnibus Database Machine: How to NoSQL in Postgres with Django by Aleck Landgraf and Gavin McQuillan

And pizza from Building Energy!

Join us afterward at Rogue on NW 14th & Flanders to continue the discussion over a beverage.

RSVP at Meetup

Join us on our python.org mailing list and in #pdxpython on Freenode. All are welcome!

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.

The Rentrak Hackathon is a gathering of laptops and laughter. Classically, we all sit in a square and type words onto a keyboard that then get turned into a "computerized program". It's a good chance to work on your personal projects, learn what your peers are up to (computer-wise), figure out what the best programming language is, and/or say the words "I don't have anything to work on" or "I forgot my laptop". This event is very informal, and there is no specific project we'll be focusing our efforts on.

Food and refreshments are served. RSVPing to [email protected] is appreciated, but not required.

Come check out Rentrak's new downtown office. Everyone is welcome to join us!

See website for details.

Programming OS Web Spatio-temporal Mapping Visiualizations: Tues, Dec 30, 7:00pm, Anna Bananas St Johns, 8716 N. Lombard, Portland, Oregon (back room). This month we will work with OpenStreetMap Data. We will use JOSM to edit OSM data and learn to download OSM data for use in our web visualizations.

NOTE: we have a new time ... we will begin at 7pm and go to 9pm. If you are late, come anyway. We will be in the back room mapping away :)

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.

PostgreSQL 10 is now out in beta. We called it 10 because this release is going to blow your socks off. Josh Berkus will demonstrate several of the new features in this version, including built-in logical replication, native partitioning, additional query parallelism, JSON full-text search, and more. He'll also explain some of the issues you're likely to encounter upgrading to Version X.

Josh Berkus recently retired from the PostgreSQL Core Team and is currently working for Redhat as the Project Atomic Community Lead.

— If you have a job posting or event you would like me to announce at the meeting, please send it along. The deadline for inclusion is 5pm the day before the meeting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For an opening act, CNPDX organizer Josh Berkus will demo a walk-through of deploying high availability PostgreSQL as an application on Kubernetes.

Our main event will be:

Deploying TiDB, a distributed open-source MySQL-Compatible HTAP Database, using Kubernetes

This talk will introduce TiDB's architecture, key use cases, a user story with Mobike (one of the largest bikesharing platforms in the world), and a deep-dive into deploying TiDB as a stateful application using Kubernetes. TiDB is built by the company PingCAP and its open-source community.

Speakers: Ed Huang (co-founder/CTO of PingCAP), Kevin Xu (GM of U.S. at PingCAP)

As a special bonus for this meetup, TiDB will hold a business card raffle for a Google Home Mini at the end of the presentation.

Our meetup host this month will be software maker Eleven.

PLEASE RSVP on Meetup.com if you can, so that we can get a headcount for food.

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

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.

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/

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.

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/).

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: 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 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: 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.