Postgres and Open Source Experts

PostgreSQL Conference West (PgWest) 2010, the premiere PostgreSQL Conference for developers, users and decision makers is pleased to welcome Sun Microsystems founder, Scott McNealy as Key Note Speaker.

Please join us November 2nd - 4th at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in sunny San Francisco for three days of networking, education, geeks, food and fun!

Registration is now open. The Agenda is available. As are the full talk descriptions!

And …

Most people are aware that we use Drupal for the PostgreSQL Conference. We are loud advocates of the platform, because it works -- mostly. In terms of being able to run a conference it is flexible enough to make it quirks bearable. However the one place that Drupal is severely lacking is event/scheduling. What is available is either lacking, broken, or just not yet done. Because of this we …

While at PgEast or PgWest I normally don't attend talks. Usually I am running around checking on rooms, making sure cameras are working or just generally recovering from yet another round of social interaction with everyone that is there. Do not kid yourself, it is exhausting.

This year at West I am hoping to attend a couple of talks. There are a few that are particularly interesting to me. The …

The Utah Open Source Conference is coming up next week and I will be speaking on PostgreSQL. The presentation I was selected to give is my Dumb Simple PostgreSQL Performance talk.

This talk aims to solve the performance (and maintenance) problems most associated with a default install of PostgreSQL. The depth of the talk is limited and is designed specifically for people who are *not* database people, e.g; Web Developers …

I was sitting in #postgresql today (no not the twitter, the irc) talking to some of the community peeps and I came across this tidbit. MySQL casts integers to float before division[1]. Say what?

mysql> SELECT 3/5;
        -> 0.60

To be honest, I can't fault MySQL for this behavior. It falls in line with the MySQL mantra of make it easy, not "necessarily" correct. A division of 3/5 in a …

O.k. so I have been pushing on everyone I know to support PGXN. Command Prompt, (you know, us) hadn't bothered to donate. Mainly we hadn't donated because we wanted to be a founding sponsor but just didn't have the budget for it, with the whole PostgreSQL Conference thing going on.

Today, we put our money where our rather obnoxious mouth is and became a benefactor (at the tune of …

The talk descriptions for PgWest 2010 are now up. As you can see, there is a lot of content that will be presented over the three days. There is a great mix of developer and user (DBA) content. If you haven't done so already, now is the time to register.

If you have not booked your room for PgWest, now is the time. There is a very real possibility that the cost of the hotel will go up in the next week. Now is not the time to be a traditional geek procrastinator.

Oracle MySQL recently started sending letters to their current clients about upcoming price changes[1]. It is certainly expected that Oracle would increase pricing, but I wonder by how much?

Oracle owns another fairly well known Open Source database, BerkeleyDB. The pricing for BerkeleyDB. suggests that MySQL may be in for a culture shock. MySQL appears to have removed their support pricing from its website (a move that should not provide …

PGXN is the stuff. It is going to enable a whole new ecosystem of software for PostgreSQL complete with easy install, easy search, modular design and yeah unfortunately Perl.

That said, it is time to pony up. David Wheeler has put in some serious effort, well thought out, professionally designed and peer reviewed effort on delivering a new architecture for PostgreSQL software and modules. He needs our financial support.

Go …