Pending Portland Postgres Presentations

This year is apparently my year to spend most of my time in Portland.  Maybe I should move there ;-)  Please read through if you are in Portland or are attending conferences in Portland for a list PostgreSQL-related events there.

O'Reilly OSCON 2014: on Monday, July 21st, I will be presenting The Accidental DBA again at OSCON.  O'Reilly has asked me to reprise this tutorial as it was sold out last year.  This tutorial covers the care and feeding of a PostgreSQL server for people whose main job is something else, or for those new to database administration.  Will include multiple hands-on exercises using Vagrant on your own laptop.  The exercises are on github, but will be updated on or before July 10th in order to cover 9.3 and feedback from the last talk.

Note that there will also be a special PDXPUG meeting or BOF at OSCON; details TBD.  I will also be doing an Office Hours session at OSCON on July 22nd at 3:20 PM; please bring your questions about PostgreSQL scalability and replication.

I am likely to be speaking at DjangoCon.us in September.  As the Call for Presentations is still open, I don't know what it will be about, or have confirmation that I will, in fact, be speaking.

Right between DjangoCon.us and FOSS4G, PDXPUG will be hosting a full PostgreSQL Day at Portland State University on September 6.  This event is free, so if you are going to either DjangoCon or FOSS4G, extend your stay in Portland in order to attend!  RSVP required.

People are still submitting presentations for that; if you're interested in speaking, contact Mark per the wiki page.  I expect to be talking about 9.4, replication, or maybe Postgres on Amazon.

Finally, at FOSS4G, I will be doing a full day of Postgres/PostGIS workshops.  In the morning I will do Accidental DBA again, this time tailored for PostGIS administrators.  In the afternoon, I will do a hands-on "learning to do PostGIS replication" tutorial.  This does mean that I will likely not include much about replication in the morning session.  Both of these workshops are "bring your own device", which means that you will need to install the tutorial materials on your laptop in advance.

Since I will be spending the first half of September in Portland.  If you or your company is interested in onsite training or consulting during September, please get in touch with PGX.

PostGIS Day Tommorrow

The PostGIS project is throwing a "PostGIS Day" online tommorrow.  As part of this, I will be on a panel with Paul Ramsey, Stephen Mather and Bborie Park at 10am PST tommorrow (Thursday) on Google Hangout.  Join us there!

PostGIS 2.0 in Berkeley Tommorrow

Brian Hamlin will be presenting PostGIS 2.0 at Soda Hall in Berkeley tommorrow.  If you can't make it, it will probably be live on video (not sure about wireless quality).

FOSS4G-NA 2012

I just spent the week in DC speaking at FOSS4G-NA, or as I like to call it, "Fossforgna".  I came out at the invitation of the conference committee, and did a talk on "PostgreSQL 9.2 and Beyond" and a keynote on "Firehose Engineering", slides for both of which are located on our presentations page.  My "BOF" on Postgres peformance was less successful, because the attendees brought really hard problems.  Here's a heads-up: PostGIS desperately needs parallel query support.

The big news, of course, is the release of PostGIS 2.0.  I also saw excellent talks by: CartoDB (Maps-as-a-service, running on PostGIS); Metropolitan Airports Commission (flight tracking using PostGIS and PL/R); the British Anarctic Survey (tracking pack ice with PostGIS); NOAA's mapping system for international emergencies (especially poignant on Tuesday).  There were multiple talks about using opengeo stacks with PostGIS for various forms of ecological and biological tracking, including ocean floor diversity, deforestation, and endangered species tracking.  Just overall, really cool stuff which makes me proud to have done a very small part in helping enable it.

The hallway track was also very busy and I met a lot of people I never knew were using PostGIS before.

There were somewhere between 300 and 400 people at FOSS4GNA, and with only a couple of exceptions, every single one was using PostGIS.  The conference really brought home to me that PostGIS users probably now make up the majority of the PostgreSQL user base, and us folks in "mainstream" PostgreSQL ought to be paying more attention to that.  While PostgreSQL is a highly competitive relational database, PostGIS is the unquestioned first choice for GIS applications.

In any case, a terrific conference for open source geospatial application developers of all kinds, and a great opportunity to make business contacts in the opengeo world.  I recommend attending the next Fossforgna next year.