Category Archives: speaking

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9.1 presentation at Windy City Perl Mongers

I recently updated my PostgreSQL 9.1 slides for a presentation at the Windy City Perl Mongers.

We discussed 10 features that the Postgres community decided to emphasize in our press releases. The crowd was primarily people who had never used Postgres before, which was a bit of a different audience for me.

It was great to be able to compare notes with folks who are supporting Oracle and SQL Server, and see a lot of excitement for trying out 9.1.

When I’m traveling around, I’ll be looking for more non-Postgres user groups to give talks like this. Let me know if you’d like me to come speak at yours!

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OSCON: Postgres represent! And my links for Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger talk

I’m giving a couple talks at OSCON this year. The first is on Tuesday, 10:40am room C123: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: Postgres 9.1. The other is Mistakes were Made, Wednesday at 1:40pm in room D136.

My colleague Robert Treat is giving a Pro PostgreSQL workshop Wednesday at 1:40pm too, room 204. He’s also giving a Scalability Patterns talk at 4:20pm Tuesday. I’m sure his talks will be awesome. 🙂

And here are the rest of the talks tagged with PostgreSQL.

Also remember — there’s a PgDay tomorrow at the Oregon Convention Center!

I’m pushing my examples for my 9.1 talk into a github repo. It should be populated with whatever I decide to use for the talk by Monday evening.

Building 9.1 for me on Mac OS X (leopard!) involved the following:


git tag -l | grep REL9_1
git checkout REL9_1_BETA2
./configure --with-perl --with-python --prefix=/opt/pg91beta2 --with-readline
make
make install

Normal caveats apply – you need X Code of a reasonably recent version, and a bunch of support libraries to make this happen. I haven’t rebuilt from scratch on OS X in a long time, but now I realize that maybe I aught to go through the pain and document this again.

But I digress!

I have a long list of resources for this talk and wanted to share. Probably in the slides for the talk, I’ll provide shortlinks so that people can pull them up and read instead of listening to me 😀

Here’s my links:

And if you’re wondering about the title, I took it from an great Daft Punk song that fans have created some epic videos of:

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Two talks at MySQL Conf done! Slides…

Just finished my last talk. Slides are downloadable here, and also embedded after the break.

MySQL Conf – Managing Terabytes

Own it: Working with a changing open source community

The floor show is closed, so no more booth work tomorrow. I’ve had a great time here talking with people and seeing my colleagues in the PostgreSQL and MySQL community.

Looking forward to getting some hacking time in tomorrow and enjoying an evening connecting with people instead of working on slides. 🙂

Continue reading →

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Explaining MVCC in Postgres: system defined columns

I’m playing around with some diagrams for explaining MVCC that I’ll be posting here over the next few days. Not sure if I’ll end up giving up on slides and just use a whiteboard for the talk. I made an illustrated shared buffers deck to go along with Greg Smith’s excellent talk on shared buffers a while back. This is the beginning of a talk that I hope will emulate that.

Here are my first few slides, showing the system-defined columns. The next few slides will describe optimizations PostgreSQL has for managing the side effects of our pessimistic rollback strategy, and reducing IO during vacuuming and index updates.

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Off to MySQL Con

I’m presenting a 25-minute talk on “Thinking about Performance” on Wednesday, around 5:25p at the Percona Performance Conference. My plan is to talk about performance testing and how to go about useful optimizations. This will be in the context of the PostgreSQL Performance Pad testing, and the performance-focused talks Mark Wong has been giving at Portland State University. Stop by if you get the chance – and you’re in San Jose! It’s free.

Robert Treat will be giving a talk on PostgreSQL at 11:15am that should be good, and we’re having a BoF during MySQL Con at 7:30pm. Quite a bit of Postgres-focused content at MySQL Con on Wednesday 🙂

I’m sad that I’ll be missing the Open Source Bridge Town Hall tomorrow night, but you should go! 🙂

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How to kill 4 chickens in 3 years

I had a great time at Ignite Portland 5 last night. There were seventeen other fantastic presenters, amazing volunteers and the always great Legion of Tech crew there to cheer us all on. Oh, and like 700 people in the crowd!

Thanks to everyone who helped me out on this presentation. Especially my husband, Scott, who really did volunteer for that slide.

Enjoy the slidecast below, with some audio commentary I recorded this morning (drop.io FTW!) below. @linuxaid‘s video should be up soon!

How to kill 4 chickens in 3 years

And here’s @linuxaid’s video:

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Leading without being in charge: updated slides for FOSDEM 2009

I’ve got a post about Heikki’s visibility map talk in the queue, but first I’ll post the updated slides for the user groups talk — Leading without being in charge.

Enjoy!

Leading Without Being In Charge

View more presentations from Selena Deckelmann. (tags: user groups)

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Filesystem I/O at the Linux Plumbers Conference

http://osdldbt.sourceforge.net/dl380/4disk/sraid10/ext3/read-write/
graph from software raid, RAID10, no partition table, ext3, read-write load

If you haven’t heard, the Linux Plumbers Conference is happening September 17-19, 2008 in Portland, OR. It’s a gathering designed to attract Linux developers – kernel hackers, tool developers and problem solvers.

A few of us that met through the Portland PostgreSQL User Group (PDXPUG) pitched an idea for a talk on filesystem performance. We wanted to examine performance conventional wisdom and put it to the test on some sweet new hardware, recently donated for performance testing Postgres. We’re asking questions like: Is RAID5 really the worst performing configuration for a database? How much does partition alignment really matter? Is there one Linux filesystem that a DBA should always choose for best performance under any load? Is adaptive readahead all that?

Our talk was accepted, so we’ve been furiously gathering data, and drawing interesting conclusions, ever since. Gabrielle Roth and I are presenting, using the results of extensive testing conducted by Mark Wong, a database benchmarking expert and author of pg_top. We’ll be sharing 6 different assumptions about filesystem performance, tested on five different filesystems, under five types of loads generated by fio, a benchmarking tool designed by kernel hacker Jens Axboe to test I/O.