Posted Wednesday Jan 13th, 2010 12:14pm
by Joshua Drake |
Permalink
We announced the
CFP for PostgreSQL Conference East back in December. Since that time, we have been working diligently to make this the best PostgreSQL Conference ever presented in the United States. The signing of Platinum partner
EnterpriseDB and the subsequent change of venue has been an exciting foray into a new phase of the PostgreSQL Conference series.
However, what has really surprised me is the number of individual emails I have received from people. Generally speaking, the Conferences East and West are self populating. The community knows the conferences exist. They know it generates funds for PgUS and .Org. They also know that it is a chance to meet a lot of the contributors, learn and generally just have a good time.
What is new, is the people that are contacting me are not normal members of the community. You are not going to see them on -general or -hackers. These are true End Users. They represent the community, outside the community. What I want to know is where these people are coming from? Are they new to PostgreSQL? Are they exploring new alternatives to legacy databases such as MySQL? Perhaps PostgreSQL is just growing up.
Don't get me wrong, PostgreSQL for many years has far surpassed any open source database in overall capability, performance, management and features. However, the community as a whole has only recently realized the importance of cross pollination to other user groups and not being so anal retentive that all we do is turn off potential users. I think we are starting to see actual pay off there.
As an example, I know SelenaD and JoshB are both speaking at non-traditional conferences about PostgreSQL. For my part, I have been actively speaking at user groups around the Pacific Northwest, including Django, Python and next week Perl. My topic of course is, PostgreSQL Performance.
So, with all the changes in our ecosystem, I invite anyone to contact me about the conference, PgUS or .Org. I would love to just chat, possibly visit your user group or help you find a speaker for your user group.
Don't forget to come to East. This conference is going to rock!
Posted Tuesday Jan 5th, 2010 03:24pm
by Joshua Drake |
Permalink
East 2010 is taking it up a notch! This year, along with Platinum Partner EnterpriseDB, we will be making an aggressive marketing campaign not only to community but also professionals, and decision makers.
With this aggressive marketing campaign we have adjusted the conference to be four days, March 25th - 28th. We have also moved from Drexel University to the Radison Plaza, Warwick Hotel. This is to better allow for business professionals outside of our normal community to attend the conference. It is also to allow for the most exposure to potential exhibitors.
Yes, I said exhibitors. This year, PostgreSQL Conference East will have a limited exhibit space (13 (of 15) currently available). The exhibit space is within the main hall, where the Keynote, Social area and Food/Beverages will be provided.
Please join Command Prompt and EnterpriseDB in making this the largest, most successful PostgreSQL conference ever!
Posted Monday Dec 14th, 2009 12:06pm
by Joshua Drake |
Permalink
Call for papers.
December 14th, 2009, the PostgreSQL Conference U.S. team is pleased to announce the East 2010 venue and call for papers. This year the premiere East Coast PostgreSQL Conference will be returning to history Drexel University in Philadelphia.
The event this year is being held at Drexel University in Philadelphia from March 26th through 28th. Following previously successful United States PostgreSQL conferences, we will be hosting a series of 3-4 hour tutorials, 90 minute mini-tutorials, 45 minute talks, 5 minute lightning talks and a new 30 minute presentation time slot.
Time line:
- December 14th: Talk submission opens
- January 30th: Talk submission closes
- February 15th: Speaker notification
This year we will be continuing our trend of covering the entire PostgreSQL ecosystem. We would like to see talks and tutorials on the following topics:
- General PostgreSQL:
- Administration
- Performance
- High Availability
- Migration
- GIS
- Integration
- Solutions and White Papers
- The Stack:
- Python/Django/Pylons/TurboGears/Custom
- Perl5/Catalyst/Bricolage
- Ruby/Rails
- Java (PLJava would be great)/Groovy/Grails
- Operating System optimization (Linux/FBSD/Solaris/Windows)
- Solutions and White Papers
If you are using PostgreSQL as your platform, you need to be presenting at this conference!
Submit Paper. (You must be logged in)
Posted Thursday Nov 19th, 2009 09:35am
by Joshua Drake |
Permalink
Shout out to Mark Long and Lacey Powers for showing up to support a Pg dude in a foreign land. Preceding my talk on PostgreSQL Performance, Adam Lowry gave and interesting intro to a database connection pooling module he wrote for Django. Essentially they bolted SQLAlchemy's pooler into Django. He then gave some metrics, showing that through the connection pooler they dropped overall request time in half. It was a basic and good indicator of why connection pooling is good, even on smaller applications.
Read more...
Posted Wednesday Nov 18th, 2009 09:41am
by Joshua Drake |
Permalink
I have the unexpected pleasure of speaking at PDXDjango tonight on PostgreSQL performance. Their meetings are 90 minutes with about 60 minutes (in theory) for the main speaker. The talk I am giving is a quick introduction to PostgreSQL Performance. The description I gave to the group was:
- I am a Django developer not a DBA.
- I know nothing about PostgreSQL performance.
- What 10 things (it will be more) can I change to make PostgreSQL faster?
I am being as thorough as possible based on the time constraints and explaining what each option is and how it works. I didn't want to just say, "Change it to 10".
If you are in the neighborhood, stop by and let me know all the things I say that are wrong. The meeting starts at 7:00PM.
PIE
1227 NW Davis St
Portland, Oregon
(At the corner of NW Davis & NW 12th).
Posted Thursday Oct 22nd, 2009 12:51pm
by Joshua Drake |
Permalink
I am back home and done recovering from Pg West 2009. I can now provide some closing thoughts. I think the conference as a whole went very well. This is the first time we did a zero swag conference and the majority of people didn't seem to mind. SWAG is probably the single largest contributor to time spent organizing a conference (in a single block). By not having swag has allowed the team is able to organize the conference from a single Rubbermaid.
We had some scheduling snafus, mostly based around two different versions of the schedule being printed (my bad) and a certain speaker (yeah you Robert Hodges;)) not following the speakers list. In all though these were minor and the attendees took it all in stride. It was great.
The Keynote was fun. I wrote the talk late, just finishing right before walking into the room. While writing the talk I was chatting with Big Jim (Jimbo from EDB). He made it a point to request special treatment for the EDB boss from Red Hat. You can get his name
from the slides. When the video is up, you will see the particular ribbing that was provided. It was all in good fun of course and EDB was a great partner in the festivities.
This time around I purchased SDHC based cameras which has enabled me to already start getting videos up. In fact the only thing stopping me from having them all up is that I have a quota on the account.
You can check here for videos and slides that we currently have up.
One thing that didn't happen was a closing session and I did hear some grumbling about that. I want to apologize to the attendees that wanted one. It is a good idea to have that and we didn't.
In closing, I am glad it is over. I am glad I muscled through it (I strongly considered not having West this year). I am most glad that I focused on family during the after hours versus going to the various parties. No offense to the speakers or attendees. It is just what I needed this time around.
We are already starting to talk about East as well as a Denver or Austin. Stay tuned!
Posted Friday Oct 16th, 2009 03:53pm
by Joshua Drake |
Permalink
What an amazing Friday. Normally on Fridays, PgWest and East are sparsely populated. Usually running in the mid 50s. Today was a great day with 87 people attending and many more slated to attend on Saturday. Even some unexpected contributors showed up such as Robert Bernier.
If you are reasonably close, and if you are thinking about coming; now is the time to make the commitment. If you are here by Saturday, there is a great party planned by EnterpriseDB, Saturday night.
If there are too many commas in this blog, it is the fault of my daughter. She said it was comma happy day.
Conference details here.
Posted Thursday Oct 15th, 2009 01:10pm
by Joshua Drake |
Permalink
Well I made it to Seattle. It was a bit of disaster to get here with my Wife flatly stating she was suing a well known Mexican restaurant for hot beans and bad signing from a well known pop star. I have a meeting today with the college to verify facilities. I then pick up the programs. Of course the "suites" at Spring Hill Suites are not really suites but hey, the room is clean.
Tomorrow I think I will be sitting in on the Howdah talk. It seems odd, but I have been so busy with PostgreSQL that outside of minor high level architecture discussions I am not aware of the supposed coolness that leaks from the pipes of Pylons + Howdah and PostgreSQL.
Look forward to seeing everyone!
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