American Red Cross

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.

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.