Joshua D. Drake Blog Posts

Tell us about your commitment and contribution to the Postgres Community

For over 10 years, EnterpriseDB (EDB) has been working with the community and enterprises to drive Postgres forward. EDB is one of the top PostgreSQL community contributors. Two of our team members are part of Postgres Core team, while 4 are committers, and 6 are named contributors. We invest heavily into Postgres performance, scalability, availability, migration, integration and support to make sure that enterprises can take advantage of Postgres' rapid innovation cycle and advanced capabilities.

 

What growth pattern do you expect for yourself as well as Postgres as a whole?

Postgres adoption is exploding and we can see that in our business results. Today, we support 92 of the Fortune 500 and 311 of the Forbes Global 2000. Our customers look to us for a reliable, high-performing, and cost-effective data management platform based on open source PostgreSQL.

 

Our customers are using EDB Postgres for mission critical applications. Their databases range all the way up to 50 TB with some handling over 50K transaction per second in environments that require 99.99%+ availability.

 

Our customers’ confidence in Postgres and EDB is no surprise. Postgres has been the #1 open source relational database in the DB-Engines.com rankings for two years in a row and EnterpriseDB has been chosen for the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems for six years in a row.

 

 

How do you plan to assist Postgres in the future?

EDB continues to invest heavily in Postgres with key projects such as zHeap, Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation, and other efforts focused on performance and scalability.

 

What is the number one benefit you see within Postgres that everyone should be aware of?

EDB Postgres has become the general purpose database of choice for digital transformations, offering JSONB document support, GIS-support, EDB Postgres Oracle® compatibility features, key-value pair data, and increasing capabilities for analytical workloads. It has the fastest innovation cycle, the best deployment models, and the lowest cost of any commercial relational database.

 

What is the best thing about working with the Postgres community?

The best thing about working with the Postgres community is their fast innovation, resulting in extremely reliable code.

 

Tell us why you believe people should attend PostgresConf 2019 in March.

PostgreSQL is one of the oldest and most stable open source projects as a result of the commitment of its members and its independence as a stand-alone community. Over the years, Postgres has achieved parity with proprietary platforms in terms of performance and functionality. It has received a warm welcome from businesses looking to roll back database costs and ease vendor lock-in, and leading companies are adopting it with great success. This is just like it was with Linux 15 years ago. Enterprises understand that they have to adopt Postgres or they will be left behind.

 

Company Description
EnterpriseDB (EDB), the database platform company for digital business, delivers the premier open source-based data platform for new applications, cloud re-platforming, application modernization, and legacy migration. EDB Is the developer of the most complete Postgres-based database platform.

 

Joshua D. Drake     February 12, 2019

PGConf US, in partnership with Ohio Linux Fest, is pleased to announce that the call for papers for PGConf Local: Ohio is now open.

The inaugural PGConf US Local: Ohio Conference (PGConf Ohio) will be held September 29th - 30th at the Hyatt Regency Columbus Ohio (350 North High StreetColumbus, Ohio, USA43215).

This two day, single track conference is a perfect opportunity for users, developers, business analysts, and enthusiasts from Ohio to amplify Postgres and participate in the Postgres community.


The Call for Papers for PGConf Ohio can be found here.

Call for papers will be open until Sunday, August 24th, 2017 and speakers will be notified of acceptance/decline no later than Monday, September 1st, 2017.

Conference Schedule:
  • Friday, September 29, 2017: Trainings
Mastering Postgres Administration: Bruce Momjian
Postgres Performance and Maintenance: Joshua D. Drake 
  • Saturday, September 30, 2017: Breakout Sessions (To be announced)

Registration for the
PGConf Ohio trainings is open now.

Conference speakers receive complimentary entry to the breakout sessions on September 30th. The half-day training options on September 29th are separately priced sessions. As a nonprofit event series, funding is currently not available for speaker travel and lodging accommodations.

Sponsorship Opportunities
The PGConf US Local series is supported by its generous sponsors: Diamond Sponsor Amazon Web Services and Platinum Sponsors Compose, 2ndQuadrant, and OpenSCG. Please contact us if you are interested in joining our wonderful sponsors for Ohio or National!

About PGConf US:
PGConf US is a nonprofit conference series with a focus on growing the community through increased awareness and education of Postgres. PGConf US is known for its highly attended national conference held in Jersey City, New Jersey, and has expanded to a local series for 2017.

The PGConf Local series partners with regional Postgres and open source groups to bring dynamic and engaging Postgres related content and professional training experiences to local communities. Host cities of 2017 include Philadelphia, Ohio, Seattle, Austin, and Cape Town, South Africa, with more locations to follow.

Contact: organizers@pgconf.us

Joshua D. Drake     August 15, 2017

The third PGConf US event of the year is happening July 13 - 14th! Tickets are now available!

This year the event is at Huntsman Hall located at The Wharton School. There will be two days of awesome Postgres content. On July 13th we are pleased to offer two great training sessions by two of the most veteran members of the PostgreSQL community, Bruce Momjian and Joshua Drake. Between them they have well over 40 years of hands-on experience with PostgreSQL. 

On July 14th we have eight first-rate sessions covering everything from Postgres performance to development. Check out the full schedule here:
Sponsorship opportunities for the conference are still available. If you use Postgres, support Postgres, or if you are looking to recruit a local Postgres expert, this is a great opportunity. Become a part of our dynamic and growing ecosystem! The prospectus is available at:

We would not be able to produce PGConf Local: Philly 2017 without the generous support from our sponsors:

For more information about PGConf US please visit: PGConf US


PGConf US: People, Postgres, Data



Joshua D. Drake     June 20, 2017

Announcing PostgresConf Silicon Valley 2019, September 18th - 20th at the Hilton San Jose! An absolute perfect pairing of training, breakout sessions, and a fantastic weekend break to enjoy the valley for every speaker, attendee, volunteer, and organizer. 

Didn't you just host the community at PostgresConf Silicon Valley, you ask? Why yes we did! That event was October 15th and 16th of 2018. The event was such an unexpected success that we immediately started working with the hotel to lock in our dates for 2019. We requested mid-October to early November. Unfortunately, the only week they had available was the week of September 15th, 2019. We are again working with the Silicon Valley Postgres Meetup; the fastest growing Postgres meetup in the United States. 

As we continue to be the fastest growing, non-profit, inclusive, and volunteer organized event we are providing you the breakdown of the Silicon Valley 2018 financials:


PostgresConf Silicon Valley is much more cost effective than the "big" conference in Manhattan and that is exactly what we want as a development or "local" conference. We are targeting 50% growth for 2019 and we want do so in a way that is inviting to new community members that won't overwhelm them. We succeeded with that in 2018 and we are going to continue the mission of People, Postgres, Data!

The global non-profit Postgres Conference Series


Joshua D. Drake     November 14, 2018

PostgresConf Beijing 2019

Join our Mailing List | Attend one of our events |

Last week was PostgresConf Beijing 2019. This event was an exercise in people understanding what it truly takes to run a conference. It was a standalone event unlike PostgresOpen China in 2018 which always takes a lot more work. We had generous sponsor support with the likes of Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Pivotal, Inspur, HighGo, Credativ, and Command Prompt.

The overarching theme of the conference was of course People, Postgres, Data and we had many (translated) conversations about how Postgres can be the center of your Data Universe and how the ecosystem thrives with not only PostgreSQL but also technology such as TimescaleDB and Yugabyte. All of which are Open Source and enable People to use Postgres to manage their Data. In 2020, the plan is to have PostgresConf China in October or November. The timing will allow for a more moderate climate as well as have more time to generate international content.

English As A Second Language

As we continue to work with English-as-a-second-language communities we continue to find opportunities for them to grow and contribute. Of course the most common (and possibly difficult) opportunity is that in order to contribute code to PostgreSQL.Org, you must speak English. This is not an unreasonable requirement as English is the language of Computer Science.

A common piece of feedback we received was not that English was the consideration but the “level” of English proficiency was high. Unfortunately, verbosity is not always productive and it is certainly counterproductive when the vocabulary doesn’t take into account the non-native speaker. It would be a boost to productivity if we as a community tried to be succinct and as uncomplicated as reasonable in our communication. To put this another way and from a far more qualified source than us:

“Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.”

-- Mark Twain

Contribution Opportunities

While encouraging the Chinese community to contribute we continued to look for the low barrier of entry tasks. The obvious opportunity is translation of various project documentation. That is not the only prospect as PostgreSQL has fantastic extensibility and suggestions of developing new extensions. Contributing directly to PostgreSQL code has a high barrier of entry between English as a second language and overall overhead in building comprehensive knowledge of the core code. Extensions in contrast generally require needing to understand narrow areas of code to build a feature that is user-need specific. We are still exploring these opportunities but one option would be to invite extension authors to work with regional communities for translation or feature work.

Software You Weren’t Aware Of

Oleg from PostgresPro and PGConf.Russia was present and we were able to have some great conversations about the work they are doing, most of which can be found on Github. Although there is a lot of great software in that repository, the one that grabbed my eye as immediately useful was Zson. Zson is an extension that allows native compression of JSON/JSONB documents, greatly reducing disk space usage and increasing query speed of documents.

Please Replace IRC and Slack

Further conversations were had on how we can build a modern collaboration community that is internationally inviting, supports all languages, and is built on Open Source technologies. Initially it seems that Mattermost is a good contender but after further research it seems that we should also consider Matrix.org. The idea has barriers as the Chinese are partial to WeChat and the Professional U.S. community has left IRC for Slack, whereas other communities such as Brazil and Russia have settled on Telegram. We have a community member based working group determining next steps.

You may say that I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will be as one

-- John Lennon

Looking Forward

As People, Postgres, Data and PostgresConf continues to move forward we are looking forward to building on existing initiatives and events. We have PostgresConf Philly next week, PostgresConf Silicon Valley in September, and our next International event in October with PostgresConf South Africa. We are also continuing to work on our Inclusivity, Equit,y and Diversity initiative and launching Digital Events! This doesn’t include the growing number of meetups joining the idea of People, Postgres, Data including NYC Postgres, Silicon Valley Postgres, Philly Postgres, Seattle Postgres, and Montreal Postgres!

Quote of the week

“Those pig ears are really good.” -- Michael Meskes, Credativ and Postgresql.org committer.

Joshua D. Drake     July 11, 2019     #postgres #postgresconf

Due to a rise in concern around the Omnicron variant of COVID-19 and surprise remodeling/construction from the Hilton, Postgres Conference Silicon Valley 2022 has been rescheduled. The hotel has been apologetic and accommodating. The new dates for the conference are:

April 7-8 (Thursday - Friday)

Though this was an unexpected decision, we are confident that the delay of the event will result in a positive outcome for all involved.

Thank you for your support!

Get your tickets here.

Joshua D. Drake     January 05, 2022

 

At Postgres Conference we are always optimizing our People, Postgres, Data experience, and as more events move to Digital,  we have worked hard to perfect that collaborative experience for our community. The hard work of our volunteers has paid off, our content is top notch, and our participant account is consistently high.

 

With a now-proven track record, we are pleased to announce that we are accepting Community and Commercial presentations via the Postgres Webinar Series Call for Presentations through the end of 2020. If your presentation is accepted we will contact you directly to arrange an appropriate time to deliver your content.

Recent awesome news

KDE, arguably the most complete desktop experience for Linux, is now hosted on a private instance of Gitlab. As is proper, Gitlab only supports Postgres as the backend database.

For those who who love #FarmFresh or #farmtotable, there is a new website that showcases Farms that are delivering. It was developed using React, Rails, and Postgres. 

Upcoming Digital Events

  • July 7, 10am PT: Deep Dive into PostgreSQL Indexing

A Deep Dive into PostgreSQL Indexing

  • July 15, 10AM PT: Working with JSON Data in PostgreSQL vs. MongoDB

Working with JSON Data in PostgreSQL vs. MongoDB

Previous Digital Events:

The International Postgres conference  series continues to grow! PGConf APAC 2018 is the latest PGConf.Org addition.

Following the success of two consecutive pan-Asia Postgres event - pgDay Asia 2016 and pgDay Asia 2017 held along with FOSSASIA, we are pleased to announce PGConf APAC 2018 to be held in Singapore from 22nd to 24th of March, 2018. Once again the conference will be held along with FOSSASIA - one of the largest FOSS conference on the planet. PGConf APAC will be PostgreSQL conference series for all PostgreSQL enthusiasts and users in the Asia Pacific region.
For more details on FOSSASIA - http://2018.fossasia.org
You will be able to enjoy one of the largest PostgreSQL conference in Asia and one of the largest FOSS conferences to meet like minded individuals in the same week!
pgDay Asia 2016 and pgDay Asia 2017 would not have been possible without your awesome talks and we would like to invite speakers from all over the globe to present at the PGConf APAC 2018. We would like to open Call For Paper for PGConf APAC 2018. Some of the topics which can be used for submitting a talk are-
  1. Migration projects
  2. Performance troubleshooting and tuning
  3. noSQL and geo-spatial features of Postgres
  4. Unique use-case and customer stories
  5. Useful new features in PostgreSQL 10
For more examples you can refer to the papers which were presented at last year's event - 2016 and 2017.
Of course we are happy to accept paper proposals on any other interesting topics as well.
To submit you proposal for presentation please go to this link - http://2018.pgconfapac.org/cfp
Venue
To be Announced
Call for Papers
2017-10-10: Proposals acceptance begins
2017-12-04: Proposals acceptance ends
2017-12-13: Authors of accepted proposals contacted
If you need any additional information please contact our team at pgconfapac(at)googlegroups(dot)com.
This conference is organized by the PostgreSQL people from Asian communities. If you have any question, feel free to contact us on pgconfapac(at)googlegroups(dot)com.
For sponsorship related queries please get in touch with our team at apac-organizer(at)pgconf(dot)org.
Joshua D. Drake     October 10, 2017

 

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It is with great pleasure that we announce the final program for PGConf Local: Seattle. The schedule is still being hammered out but we have finalized the content that will be presented. Please join us in celebrating Postgres in Seattle!

 
The conference is the first Postgres event to be held in Seattle since 2009 and we have received a lot of positive feedback from the local Postgres and Data communities. Clearly Postgres has been missed in the Emerald City!
 
Training Options:
Breakout Sessions:

Track: Ops

  • Develop intelligent apps on the Azure platform using the Azure Database for PostgreSQL by Sunil Kamath
  • Tuning PostgreSQL for High Write Workloads by Grant McAlister
  • POSTGRESQL V10: AN AMPLIFIED VERSION OF POSTGRES by Joshua D. Drake
  • Enterprise Data Architecture with PostgreSQL by Kevin Kempter
  • All the dirt on Vacuum by Jim Nasby
  • Building a scalable time-series database on PostgreSQL by Matvey Arye

Track: Dev

  • Semantic Search Web System on PostgreSQL by QUAN-HA LE
  • Increase Application Performance with SQL Auto-Caching; No Code Changes by Roland Lee
  • Introduction to JavaScript Stored Procedures by Jim Mlodgenski
  • Under the hood: API integrations and more in an energy efficiency PostgreSQL + Django application by Jennifer Scheuerell
  • Using GIS in PostgreSQL by Lloyd Albin

Tracks: Big Data, Data Science and AWS/Cloud

  • With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility by Michael Sacks
  • Data Quality Expert Is Not Harvard's Sexiest Job...But... by Ben Rogojan
  • GRAKN.AI: the hyper-relational database for knowledge-oriented systems by Haikal Pribadi
  • Best Practices with Managed PostgreSQL in the Cloud by Jignesh Shah
PGConf Local: Seattle is made possible by the wonderful team of volunteers including the Seattle Postgres User Group and our sponsors:
 
 
Diamond2
 
Platinum: Compose.IO, OpenSCG, 2ndQuadrant, and Microsoft
Joshua D. Drake     October 19, 2017

Silicon Valley Postgres and PostgresConf Silicon Valley are happy to announce that early bird tickets are now available! You can purchase them here. You will want to hurry as early bird discounted tickets are only available until September 1st, 2018.

PostgresConf Silicon Valley takes place on October 15th and 16th, 2018 at the Hilton San Jose. The schedule is not finalized. However, we have a comprehensive list of content from technical leaders in the Postgres ecosystem we are reviewing. Here is a brief list of some (but not all!) of the topics to be presented:

  • Postgres 11
  • Data integrity at scale
  • Distributed data and GPDR
  • Massively Parallel Postgres for Analytics
  • Data intersection between roles
  • RDS tips and tricks
  • I didn’t know Postgres could do that!
  • Performant time-series data management analytics
The Silicon Valley schedule is expected to be published this week and we are looking forward to seeing you all in October!

PostgresConf is organized by an all volunteer team of fantastic individuals and is backed by a 501c3 non-profit. The Silicon Valley conference provides the most cost effective avenue to learn all about Postgres and the Postgres ecosystem. We invite everyone to enjoy our expertly delivered presentations, good food, the hallway track and the opportunity to learn, network and appreciate everything that is Postgres.

Joshua D. Drake     August 21, 2018