2016 Conferences

Monday, December 28, 2015

I am excited about my nine scheduled 2016 conferences. There is a good spread of continents: North America (2), Europe (5), Asia (2) (no Latin America ). I have academic (2), general open source (3), Postgres business (2), and Postgres technical (2). It is kind of odd to have seven months nearly full, but I guess this is part of Postgres's popularity. It is a nice coloring of flags too.

Out of curiosity, I did an analysis of my overnight travel days for the past few years. You can see the results in this chart.

So, I average seven travel days a month, and the numbers are surprisingly consistent. (Of course I used Postgres's timestamp and interval data types to compute this.)

A Business Card History of Postgres

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Last week, I cleaned out my junk drawer and recycled many old boxes of business cards. However, I kept a few of each and I thought it would be interesting to post an image of my Postgres-related business cards over the years. (You can see the corresponding years on my resume.) The Wilson Associates cards are from my volunteer time with Postgres.

Postgres Going in Multiple Directions

Saturday, December 12, 2015

In 2013 I blogged about Postgres advancing in multiple directions at once. Having presented my Postgres 9.5 features talk six times already (with another one coming on Tuesday), I have noticed a broader pattern.

Looking at my top-ten items from that presentation, you can see Postgres advancing in multiple use-case directions in the 9.5 release:

• Big data: brin (#2), sharding infrastructure (#9)
• Data analytics: grouping sets, cube, rollup (#3)
• Large servers: memory and locking (#5, #6)
• NoSQL: jsonb (#8)

This shows increased multi-directional activity compared to 2013.

Most company-controlled software can advance in one direction, perhaps two, simultaneously. With the community-based development of Postgres, the software can advance effortlessly in multiple directions at the same time. Well, maybe not effortlessly, but pretty close.

My Daughter Speaks

Friday, November 13, 2015

My daughter Catherine, then 12 years old, was interviewed at Postgres Open 2013 by Craig Kerstiens and Selena Deckelmann. Community members who have heard the 23-minute recording have found it humorous , and I have recently received permission to release it to a wider audience.

Tom Lane Changes His Employer

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Our own Tom Lane has changed employers and hopes to spend more time on Postgres community work.

Michael Stonebraker's Turing Award Lecture

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Michael Stonebraker won the 2014 Turing Award, primarily for designing Ingres and University Postgres. His award lecture (video) covers the start of Postgres at Berkeley in 1985 and ends with his commercialization of Postgres at Illustra in 1996. The lecture explains why Stonebraker added many of the then-groundbreaking features to Postgres, the ideas that didn't work, and the failures that sent "code over the cliff".

The lecture includes Stonebraker expressing a "huge debt of gratitude" to the Postgres open source development community for making the code "so it really works." A transcript of this section is provided by Postgres95 developer Jolly Chen (affectionately referred to as Grumpy in the video).

The video also lists the 39 people involved in Postgres at Berkeley. While I have met several of them over the years, and read their source code comments, I had never seen a full list before. It might be appropriate to add this list to the Postgres documentation, perhaps in the 0.01 release notes.

Postgres 9.5 Features Presentation

Friday, July 31, 2015

I delivered my first Postgres 9.5 features presentation in Saint Petersburg two weeks ago. I will be presentating it in California next month, and probably in other cities in the coming months.

PgCon 2015 Developer Meeting Photo

Saturday, June 20, 2015

This nice photo was taken during this year's PgCon Developer Meeting. My family was surprised at how many other developers they have met over the years. A signed copy of the photo sold for ~$500 usd at the conference's charity auction.

The meeting was very productive, and in fact the entire conference has been productive.

Postgres 9.5 Draft Release Notes

Friday, June 12, 2015

The draft Postgres 9.5 release notes are now online. This document will be adjusted regularly until the final release, which is expected later this year.

Pg_Upgrading Streaming Standbys

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

A long-requested pg_upgrade feature is the ability to do major-version upgrades of standby servers without requiring recreation of the standby servers. Thanks to Stephen Frost, it is now possible to perform such upgrades using rsync, as outlined in the 9.5 pg_upgrade documentation, step 9. This works not only for 9.5, but for all supported versions of pg_upgrade, back to 9.0.

The Purpose of the Core Team

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

There has been some confusion by old and new community members about the purpose of the core team, and this lack of understanding has caused some avoidable problems. Therefore, the core team has written a core charter and published it on our website. Hopefully this will be helpful to people.

YeSQL: Battling the NoSQL Hype Cycle with Postgres

Friday, May 29, 2015

I have written a new presentation, YeSQL: Battling the NoSQL Hype Cycle with Postgres. I have delivered the talk in Chicago and New York City.

I also want to apologize for not blogging in volume like I did in 2013 and prior years. My event schedule has not allowed time for blogging, but I have been saving blogging topics since 2013 (200+ now) and hope to return to it when my schedule allows.

Sharding Presentation

Sunday, February 1, 2015

As a followup to my scaling talk, I have written a draft of another talk, The Future of Postgres Sharding. It starts by explaining the advantages of sharding as a scaling option. It then covers future enhancements to individual Postgres features that, while useful on their own, could be combined to provide a powerful built-in Postgres sharding capability. I am hopeful this talk will help guide the community discussion of implementing built-in sharding.