We arrived at the conference site to find that the XML Data Warehousing had been canceled, so I spent that session in the Hackers’ Lounge attempting to continue work on pg_proctab, while getting kicked off the commie college wireless.

In Lists and Recursions and Trees, Oh My!, David Fetter gave us some example of old kludges to get row numbers out of Pg – “Not only is it slow, but it’s wrong” – but you may not notice that subtle wrongness in huge data sets.  This really illustrated the value of testing your data.

After lunch, I went to Josh Berkus’s 5 steps to PostgreSQL Performance Tuning.

He gave us some rules of thumb for figuring out how much RAM & CPU you need, but also recommends hiring a hardware geek to design your system for you – because vendors lie.   Try hardware out before you purchase it, or definitely test them within the warranty period.  And, here’s another use case for pg_proctab (other than my own amusement):  capacity planning.

Tip:  Don’t use autovacuum for data warehousing applications, or where you have large number of writes happening at once.  Manually vacuum those.

(An additional tip from me:  if you’re using linux, try increasing the default readahead buffer from 1024K to at least 1M for an ~80% performance improvement.  See our [in]famous file systems talk for the graphs to back this up.)

–

Thanks for another wonderful conference experience, PgPeeps!  See you again soon!

This past weekend was the 3rd annual PgWest.  The conference moved up to Seattle this year, and I think it was the biggest it’s ever been.  As usual, there were more interesting talks scheduled than I had time to attend.  (This is the 21st century;  where’s my time machine?)

For my first tech conferences a few years ago, I only went to sessions that were meaningful for my job.  I’ve since had a much better time (and learned more) by choosing which sessions I’ll attend based on the following criteria, in this order:
1) topic interestingness
2) speaker interestingess
3) relevance to my job duties

(See Tips #1 and #2 in Skud’s recent Ten tips for tech conference attendees post.)

So, right out of the gate at PgWest, I’m in a python talk* – Adrian K’s (of LinuxFestNW fame) discussion on Dabo.  Dabo’s a python desktop framework;  I program primarily in Perl, and I’ve never touched a desktop app.  Adrian’s example project was a management system for a plant nursery, which I *do* understand, so I had a point of reference into the material (the methods & options used to track plants made sense to me).  I really wanted to talk to him more about this app, but never caught up with him.  (The hallway track felt kind of rushed for me this time.)  I got a good idea for form validation – if user tries to enter a blank value where one is not allowed, they get a pop-up immediately and the original text (if there was any) is put back in the field, forcing the user to accept the original input or enter something new before they can proceed to the next field.  This is a step up from giving the user the error message after they’ve submitted the form.

Next we were on to JD’s keynote, featuring the usual heckling of and by the podium.

Then Mark’s & my talk about pg_proctab, which ended with some live demos & some audience participation, the way I like it.

A bunch of us went to lunch at Honeyhole Sandwiches, where I tried the “Texas Tease” – BBQ chicken.  The sandwich was excellent.  I *highly* recommend the fries.

Scott Bailey’s Temporal Data talk was *packed*.  He talked about the “period” datatype, featured in both his own (Chronos) and Jeff Davis’s PgTemporal project.  You can do unions & intersects on time periods.  I am thinking this would be a useful datatype for searching large tables of log entries.

Based on Scott’s talk, I decided to go to Jeff’s “Not Just UNIQUE” talk, because he would be discussing this in a little more detail.  This meant I missed the session on backup & recovery.  (See comment above about more material than I can fit in my schedule.)

I spent the last session partly in the hackers’ lounge, working on some pg_proctab wrapper scripts with Mark.

Then it was off to the EDB-sponsored after-party, where I caught up with Lloyd Albin, who spoke at PDXPUG about a year ago.  He brought me up-to-date on the work he’s done on the project, including a twitter feed to let clients know of updates, which I think is really cool.

–

*Which I was late to, because we were installing the snacks in the Hackers’ Lounge (thanks, Mark!)

(I’ll be missing Friday’s tutorials.)

Saturday:
9am:  Jeff Davis:  PostgreSQL, Extensible to the Nth Degree.  Jeff’s talks usually melt my brain, and I like that.
10:15:  Conference Keynote.
11:30am:  Mark Wong: pg_proctab.  Turns out I’m giving this talk with Mark, even though my name’s not on the schedule.  I should probably show up.
1:45pm:  Scott Bailey:  Temporal Data or Magnus Hagander:  Secure PostgreSQL Deployment.  There will be a coin toss.
3:00pm:  Kevin Kempter:  Backup and Recovery.  There’s always something else to learn about this topic.
4:00pm:  Bill Karwin:  Practical Full-text Search.

Sunday:
9:00am:  Aaron Sheldon:  XML Data Warehousing.
10:15am:  David Fetter:  Lists and Recursion and Trees (Oh, My!)  I want to learn about Windowing functions, new with 8.4
11:15am:  Matt Smiley:  Basic Query Tuning Primer.  Another topic I could stand to learn more about.
1:30pm:  Tossup between David Wheeler:  pgTAP Unit Testing Best Practices and Josh Berkus:  5 Steps to PostgreSQL Performance.  I’ll probably go to Berkus’s talk because Wheeler is a sport about repeating his talks for PDXPUG.

Other fun stuff:

The Hacker lounge will be open for two days of geekery:  7:30 am – 4:30pm Saturday, and 9-4 on Sunday.
EnterpriseDB has stepped up to provide entertainment after the Saturday sessions.
I haven’t heard if there are Lightning Talks, but I have a couple of ideas for one.  You should too.

See you there!

At a loss for what to do next weekend?  Grab your rain gear & head on up to Seattle for PgWest 2009.

There’ll be three days of talks & tutorials plus a hackers’ lounge.   After-party plans are nebulous at this time, but we are researching options.  (Psst–pub crawl!)

Come join the fun!

This week I attended Open Source Bridge here in Portland.

Typically, I managed to miss the keynotes both days. There is something about conferences which makes me sleep through my alarm.

It was really hard choosing which talks to attend. The results of the coin toss:

Wednesday:
Tcl/Tk: Grandpa might be old, but he can still kick your ass! I went to this primarily because I use Expect so much. (Well, I use Expect.pm, but I remember my roots.) Webb gave a good intro to Tcl/Tk (”Tickle-Tea-Kay!”) despite some initial technical difficulties. I finally figured out the brackets vs braces variable expansion.

Then I gave my talk. Thankfully, Impress did not surprise me. I now have my unicorn badge.

Spindle, Mutilate, & Metaprogram: This was really cool, although it seemed similar to things that came out of the Perl community a few years back. I’d like to see a throwdown between Markus Roberts & Damian Conway.

Assholes are killing your project: I only managed about 20 minutes of this talk before I got too depressed & had to leave. Sorry, Donnie! We’ll talk about this later.

I spent some time in the hall track & then hit the yoga session. This was an excellent pick-me-up after a day of talking and brain-filling, and set me up for my BoF and then some time at the pub.

Thursday:
Arrived too late for chromatic’s Intro to Parrot so hung out in the speaker lounge and watched Andy and Irving’s run-through of Virtualize vs Containerize: Fight! I love the mashups.

Next up was Emma McGratten’s Ask Forgiveness not Permission, which had a lot of excellent reasons (financial & otherwise) for using open source, but not many tips on how to subversively bring it into your organization. I’m sure I know someone who could give a talk about that. :cough:

Lunch today was the excellent KOiFusionPDX Food Cart! They came to the conference site & provided excellent korean tacos. (Yeah, I know, sounds weird – but TRUST ME.)

Speaking of trust…Trust the Vote sounds like an excellent project. Unfortunately the question period started devolving into political discussion, and I didn’t want to just dive right in there and ask them why the hell they’re using MySQL instead of PostgreSQL.

Maria Webster got her unicorn badge for Faking it Till I Make It. Check out her blog to see what geeky women are up to.

bzr vs git smackdown with Selena & Emma. I’ve already made up my mind (git all the way!), but it’s good to listen to alternatives.

The Meditiation for Geeks session didn’t go too well for me, because I was so tired that any time I got close to The Zone, I almost fell over onto a fellow PostgreSQL Smurf. Still, the yoga & meditation sessions are a great way to unwind prior to the post-con socializing & I’d like to see more of this.

Pg took over the room & had our PostgreSQL BoF, which replaced the regular PDXPUG meeting.

Josh Berkus was riding a bicycle around town, which made me inordinately happy. I want to see if we can provide more bikes for attendees next year.

Friday: The Unconference rocked my socks:
1. Emma Jane’s “Playing with yourself” about Open Source documentation teams. I am even sadder that I missed WOSCON. This got me totally excited to contribute to docs. (Especially for certain Perl modules – but that’s a discussion for another post.) Highlights: the conference team is working on a style guide, and a library of personas (which isn’t public yet)

2. I signed up with DayOn, a local volunteer effort. This will be fantastic once we can get people trained in what’s actually reasonable to ask for.

3. I did a Network Management Basics talk (”FCAPS: What the hell?!?”) with Ua and Adam. We talked about the FCAPS model & where various tools we use fit. A very high percentage of them are rrdtool-based, so we talked about that a bit as well. Adam showed us his munin install. I keep trying to find other people in town who are as into Net Management as I am…I sort of feel like I need a 12-step program sometimes. On the way out, Ua proposed a Super-Sekrit project which we’ll start working on in September. (Excitement!)

—
I saw up-close what it took to put on this conference and I’d like to congratulate the organizers on their success! Great job, and can’t wait until next year!

Talks I’m planning on attending at Open Source Bridge:

Open Source on the Farm – to see where I can help out.

Work for the Government for Fun and Profit – I used to work for the feds & it was definitely fun. Plus, I want to hear what Ms Bryant’s been up to lately.

Drop ACID and think about data – to expand my horizons.

Ask Forgiveness not Permission – Uhm, just in case I need to do this. :cough:

CodeIgniter As Drinking Game – I don’t think I need to state why I’m going to this one. (Seriously though, @christiekoehler gave a talk on this recently, and I am interested in CodeIgnitor.)

Assholes are killing your project – this is actually happening in one of my non-F/LOSS projects. I need some tools to cope, and to help me make a decision.

Faking It Til I Make It: A Woman On The Fringe Of Open Source – I want to hear what @ubergeeke has to say about this.

Open Source Development – The Dark Side – this looks like it’ll be funny. It’s good to be able to laugh at yourself.

Remember Tcl/ Tk? Grandpa might be old, but he can still kick your ass! – I still use Expect, built on Tcl/Tk. It rocks.

Others I recommend:
Is the Web Down? – This will be informative *and* entertaining, guaranteed.

Advanced Git tutorial: Not your average VCS. – I’ve seen this already & it’s awesome. This is what really built a fire under me & got me using git.

Unit Test Your Database! – I just started tinkering with PgTAP; looks like an excellent tool.

This was my first Barcamp. I’m sad I couldn’t make it to all of Saturday’s sessions – they looked great!

I only made it to two talks. First, Peter Eschright’s “Rat Salad” talk, which, I admit, I was attracted to by the possibility of gross stories. (I have some, being a former employee of CFSAN myself*.) We had an interesting discussion on what software development industry can learn from food safety initiatives.

Next up, my session on munin. (Which is pronounced “moonin”, like the thing you do on the Barfly bus.) I was hoping to find other users to discuss it, but that seemed to be what everyone came to the session looking for too. Next time I will just do my standard network management intro talk & review of tools. This was too specific for Barcamp, I think.

Igals’ TrainPorn session was next on my list, but I got sucked into Audrey Eschright’s “Creating Awkwardness” on my way through the forum. Lots of discussion about circles of friends vs circles of trust, how to protect your information, and of course some tales from the trenches (my favorite part.)

The beer ran out 30 minutes before my “How to change a flat” session. One should never attempt bike maintenance without beer, but we did anyway. We had a bigger crowd than I expected. Thanks to @robotadam for being a spokesmodel**, and @shawnzyoo for the backup!

I finished up with an intro yo-yo session from @pdxyoyo, and only hit myself in the face once.

It was fun meeting people I’ve only been hearing about. Thanks to Cubespace for hosting & providing yummy yummy food.

Coming up next week, apparently I’m participating in the QA talk at PDX.pm. I’ll be the one wearing a red shirt.

* My copy of the “Food Defect Action Levels” publication is a big hit at parties.
** Pun intentional.

Read about it here:

http://opensourcebridge.org/2009/02/call-for-proposals-we-welcome-your-ideas-until-march-31/

And then submit your proposal!

I just wrote way too much about the talks I’ll attend to at PostgreSQL Conference West. Check it out!

Let me know what you’re planning to see in the comments!

-selena

We love feedback – I’ve got alerts, RSS feeds and filters up the wazoo to let me know what people are saying. And the new feedback system for OSCON totally rocks!  We got messages about how we did instantly, and there’s nothing better for improving your presentation than getting constructive criticism right away.

But there was one message that really stuck in our craw!  Someone thought we had emphasized the social aspects of running user groups way too much.

Here’s the thing: user groups are social. The primary mission of a user group is to (wait for it…): Meet Other People.

That’s the difference between a lecture, or a class, or a job. Maybe you are coming to the meeting because you want to learn something from the topic, but the primary goal of a user group has to be about the people who are there and facilitating ways for those people to make one-to-one connections.

User groups are a way to, on a very small scale, enable the type of connections you can make at conferences. Except user groups target a very specific topic, and can in some cases be a better bet for meeting people concerned about the same things as you are in your industry!

And usually, user groups meet after hours during a person’s free time – time that they could be spending with their family, friends or just chilling out. Respect that donation of time and make it worth a person’s while! A bit of technical information never lasts as long as a new colleague or friend.