december coder’s bash – thanks, sam

I made it out for the last hour or so of the December Coder’s Bash last night. The first thing I noticed was how many people were there! At least 50 were still hanging out at 9:15pm on a Tuesday night.

They were chatting and playing games — Settlers of Catan, some kind of card game, something involving bean bags. And, of course, there was programming shop-talk. I got to talk about embedded systems with Matt, tried to beg some help with a Drupal installation from part of the PostgreSQL crew, and started to decompress a little from the ERP migration I just completed on Monday.

And there were a ton of women! My unofficial assessment was that about 15% of the group were women.

Portland is so awesome.

I want to thank Sam Keen for putting this together. I know that a lot of other people were involved, but he was the guy sending out the email, contacting us user group leaders and getting sponsorships. Sam, you really did a great job.

women’s sized t-shirts for postgresql

I have been looking into getting some woman-sized PostgreSQL shirts, in addition to the more typical men-sized tshirts. The particular style is American Apparel shirts, style # 2102. The shirt says ‘PostgreSQL’ in small print on the front, and has the big elephant logo on the back. We’ll most likely ask for a $20 donation to the PostgreSQL non-profit for each shirt.

So, I’m conducting a small poll:

If you are interested in a woman-sized shirt, please email or comment on this thread with a quantity, and size (XS, S, M, L, XL). If you would not wear a PostgreSQL woman-sized shirt yourself, please consider whether you would maybe get one as a gift for someone else this holiday season 🙂

I would be overjoyed to have my mailbox clogged with requests, so please don’t be shy!

I’m just trying to get a feel for the numbers, so your comment won’t be considered an order. Also, please forward this to anyone you think might be interested.

ptop – meeting summary from last nights pdxpug

Last night’s meeting was about ptop and Mark Wong’s efforts to make an interactive, command-line tool for monitoring the current status of a PostgreSQL database.

For our meeting, Mark set up a test operating system on a USB drive, and bravely demo’d his new software.

Mark got the idea for ptop a few months ago, and went looking for the source code to top to get started. After a few days of hacking, he had a some useful features he wanted to share. So, he’s set up a project and started gathering developers:

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/ptop

The features currently supported include displaying:

  • Current queries
  • Query plans
  • Locks
  • User table statistics
  • User index statistics

Continue reading

conference audio is up!

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 audio is now available! Check it out.

I didn’t edit much, other than to eliminate break-time chatter. My apologies to Neil Conway — I missed about 10 minutes of his talk. Thank goodness for redundancy! Once I rip the video, I will update the audio and publish the whole thing.

I’m leaving early Sunday morning for a week. I’m taking a break from the interweb while I’m away. So, I look forward to catching up with everyone when I return.

conference aftermath: tired, happy

The conference was insanely great. We had incredible speakers, plentiful coffee, good food and amazing volunteers. I met so many new people and heard about a number of interesting projects that I’ll be following up on and writing about soon. Thank you to Joshua Drake and Josh Berkus for helping organize all of the big and small details.

Thank you to the sponsors:

  • Command Prompt, Inc. – and Joshua Drake for his talk on PL/Proxy
  • Continuent- and Robert Hodges in particular for giving his talk about uni/cluster
  • EnterpriseDB
  • Greenplum
  • Hyperic – nice to meet you John Walker!
  • OmniTi – and Robert Treat in particular for his talk on partitioning
  • Open Technology Group
  • Sun Microsystems, Inc. – and to Josh Berkus for his keynote on what’s new in version 8.3
  • Truviso – and Neil Conway for his talk about Query Execution, which many people wished could have continued
  • The Linux Fund – who also brought Kristine to help manage the registration desk

And special thanks to:

  • Stonehenge, Inc. – who sponsored afternoon snacks
  • Green Frog Consulting – Allen Bernstein recorded video all day
  • Portland State University and the Graduate Student Council – thanks for hosting us and special thanks to Rafael Fernández-Moctezuma for fixing the last-minute A/V problems, suggesting a coffee run in the afternoon, and just being MVP all day!
  • Daniel Browning – he took some fantastic pictures

Thank you everyone for making it happen! There were a few people that I started conversations with but inevitably got interrupted – please get in touch.

I’ve got a week of recovery (well, except for my presentation at Ignite on Thursday!), before I head off to New Orleans. I hope to have the audio from the conference available before I leave Sunday.

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 – only two more days

We’re taking care of all the last minute details – making sure we have enough coffee Saturday morning, getting nametags printed, stuffing folders and practicing (or in some cases finishing) talks.

I created a special page for my conference posts. I’ve included links to public transportation, all the maps to find your way to and from the conference location and the party, cab info, and links to all my other posts which have more detailed information.

There is free public wireless access inside the PSU engineering building. I’ll have information on how to connect when you arrive. Please send any questions you have to the attendees mailing list (here are the archives).

We are making video and audio recordings of the conference. I’ll announce here when they’re available and make them all available from the conference page.

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 – Friday meetup

A few people on the mailing lists and IRC are organizing a meetup on the Friday before the PostgreSQL conference. Check out the wiki page set up to select a location and say whether or not you’ll be there! If you’re a local, vote for the location you’d like to meet at.

Here are the restaurants and bars currently on the list:

  • NW Lucky Lab – 1945 NW Quimby (pretty central, good space, outdoor seating)
  • Side Door – 425 SE Washington St (great food)
  • Paddy’s – 65 SW Yamhill Street (right off the max! excellent scotch selection)

If you’ll be there, and haven’t already subscribed to the attendees mailing list, go subscribe now so you’ll get the latest updates on events.