OSCON07PGDay

Yesterday PostgreSQL offered an all-day donation-supported seminar on various topics surrounding the PostgreSQL database.

Here is a very brief review:

1. 50 Ways To Contribute To PostgreSQL - Josh Berkus

  Josh Berkus is one of the main advocates of PostgreSQL and flies to all sorts of conferences to evangelize PostgreSQL.  He emphasized that coding is not the only way to contribute, and listed a good ~45 ways to contribute without having to write server code. 

I'm glad I was able to check a few of those off, (encouraging your place of employment to adopt more PostgreSQL, and donating money) but I hope to contribute more in the future.

Update: His slides are now available here.

2. Temportal Databaes - Jeff Davis & Selena Deckelmann

  Jeff and Selena talked about writing time-sensitive databases for tasks such as asset tracking.  They talked about a few data types they have written for this purpose, and how they are used.

It was interesting, but does not really relate to anything I'm currently doing.  I have been interested in writing custom types for PostgreSQL in the past, but they didn't get into the details of the implementation of the types so much as the database architecture. 

Update: Their slides are available here.

(Lunch @ Burgerville)

3. Rapid Application Development For Dummies - Rob Napier

  At first it seemed like your average corporate shill talk, with Rob showing off his company's product and building a slick front-end for a database, but then it became more apparent why he was there when he announced his company would be open-sourcing their system.  It ended up being a call for help/call to action.

The interface certainly is slick.  It is designed as a replacement for a tool such as File Maker or Access, that is something an non-programmer office worker can use to build an interface to the database.

4. PostgreSQL & Solaris - Theo Schlossnagle

  This was my favorite of the presentations, with Theo (Who has the username of 'jesus') showing off some of the tools his company Omniti has developed.  Using tools in Solaris (such as truss, dtrace, pmap, and zfs) to keep tabs on PostgreSQL.  The presentation was more of a sell of Solaris than a sell of PostgreSQL, but considering the audience, that was probably a good choice.  I'm certainly jealous of the tools, and hope someone with more wizardry than me will port them to Linux. 

If only all of the talks were like this.

Update: His slides are available here.

5. LedgerSMB - Chris Travers

  This had the potential to be a really good talk, LedgerSMB is an interesting project.  Unfortunately Chris' style of presentation is not to use slides.  This ended up meaning that very little was presented, and what was discussed was fairly disjointed.  He brought up some things I would like to talk to him about, most notably that they have Perl automatically detect PostgreSQL functions with certain naming schemes and install those functions into Perl as object methods for that data class.  I'm hoping to discuss what sort of implications that has considering Perl doesn't understand polymorphism or overloading (well, not easily) and PostgreSQL functions are frequently overloaded.  This seems like it could cause some headaches.

Overall it was a decent day, and not a bad way to spend the day.  It was probably worth the donation, if at least for the networking. 

Update: His slides (I don't remember him having any...?) are available here.