Postgres Rising in Russia

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

I just returned from two weeks in Russia, and I am happy to report that Postgres is experiencing strong growth there. I have regularly complained that Russian Postgres adoption was lagging, but the sanctions have tipped the scales and moved Russia into Postgres hyper-adoption mode. New activities include:

• Postgres Day in Saint Petersburg in July
• Moscow meetings in September and October with 180 attendees
• October Postgres Day in Saint Petersburg
• Strong Postgres presence and booth at Highload++
• 2015 conferences in Moscow and Saint Petersburg

As part of my visit I spoke at EnterpriseDB partner Lanit. The hour-long presentation was recorded and covers:

• Postgres community development process
• Comparison of Postgres to proprietary databases
• Future direction of Postgres

2015 Postgres Conferences

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Due to the increased popularity of Postgres, conference organizers are more confident about future conferences and are announcing their conference dates earlier, perhaps also to attract speakers. These are the conferences already announced for 2015:

• February, Fosdem, Brussels (dedicated Postgres day)
• February, PgConf.Russia, Moscow
• February, Scale, Los Angeles (dedicated Postgres day)
• March, PGConf US, New York City
• June, PGCon, Ottawa
• July, PG Day'15 Russia, Saint Petersburg
• September, PGDay Campinas 2015, Campinas, Brazil
• October, PostgreSQL Conference Europe, Vienna
• November, pgbr, Porto Alegre, Brazil

I don't remember ever seeing this many Postgres conferences scheduled this far in advance. (Most of these are listed on the Postgres Wiki Events page.) If you know of any other scheduled 2015 conferences, please post the details as a comment below.

Two New Presentations

Friday, October 24, 2014

PostgreSQL Conference Europe has just finished and I delivered two new presentations at the conference (a first for me). Postgres Scaling Opportunities summarizes scaling options, and Flexible Indexing with Postgres summarizes indexing options. I have been submitting these presentations to conferences for many months but this is the first conference to have chosen them. The talks were well attended and generated positive feedback.

The talks are more surveys rather than focussing on specific technologies. It might be beneficial for future conferences to have more survey-oriented talks, as many attendees are not Postgres experts.

I am now heading to Russia for two weeks, presenting in St. Petersburg and Moscow. I will also be visiting with our server developers in Russia who created some very significant features for Postgres 9.4.

Postgres Pool Party

Saturday, June 14, 2014

If you are near Philadelphia, you are invited to attend the 2014 Postgres Pool Party at my home:

• When: Saturday, July 26, 2pm to 7pm
• Where: my home in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania (directions)
• What: barbecue, swimming, and good conversation

All Postgres users, developers, and groupies are invited, including their families. Please rsvp via email by July 20.

Postgres Gets the Business

Sunday, April 6, 2014

I just returned from attending PGConf NYC. They had 259 participants, more than double last year's total. The conference was in a hotel near Wall Street.

While I have been to many Postgres user conferences, this felt like my first corporate Postgres conference. Presenters from multinational banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley explained how and why they use Postgres in their organizations. These are trend-setting organizations, and their public embrace of Postgres will have lasting benefits.

In fact, one hallway discussion was how to enable large organizations like these, particularly those with significant legal and regulatory requirements, to work with the Postgres community. Some companies have employees post from non-company email accounts like Gmail, while others contract with consulting companies to work with the Postgres community on their behalf. Unfortunately, neither of these approaches have the companies working with the community openly. There were also many requests for improved auditing.

Another business-oriented aspect of the conferences was a dedicated security track. As part of that, Denish Patel's PCI Compliance talk (slides) dispelled much of the confusion around PCI compliance.

I was able to present a new talk at the conference, Making Postgres Central in Your Data Center. It explains how Postgres is uniquely positioned to be a central data broker.

For me, this conference was a clear sign of significant Postgres growth in the months ahead.

Integrated Cache Invalidation for Better Hit Rates

Saturday, March 1, 2014

I just attended and presented at ConFoo, where I always learn new things. This year, the best talk I attended was by our own Magnus Hagander. Called Integrated Cache Invalidation for Better Hit Rates, it addresses the difficult task of controlling web page cache refresh by providing a reliable mechanism for invalidating the cache when the database changes. It shows how to use triggers and pgq to communicate changes to a Varnish web frontend.

Caching in front of a database is often risky. However, with triggers, pgq, and Varnish, proper invalidation can be accomplished, dramatically increasing the scalability of database-backed websites.