Magnus Hagander's PostgreSQL blog - PostgreSQL

FOSS STHML #1

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:05:00 +0000

Yesterday was the first meeting for the FOSS STHLM "group" - a (very) loose group of FOSS interested people in the Stockholm region. We met in a lecture hall at the Stockholm University in Kista north of Stockholm, for a couple of hours of short presentations. The lineup was very nice: cool embedded stuff? yup, rockbox. General linux? Yup, upstart. Debian-specific? Of course. OpenSource Sweden? yeah. Curl? What else did you expect with Daniel as one of the organizers? PostgreSQL? Yeah, why else would I be blogging this?

Our allocated time was short, so the setup was many short talks. It actually worked a lot better than I thought it would, but it's still very hard to convey something useful in just 20 minutes.

I had a hard time figuring out what I should focus on, so I did a split into two parts (perfect strategy - if you have too little time to do one thing good, do two things in the same time instead...). I started with a section about "things to think about if you're switching to PostgreSQL or trying it out for the first time" - things like the very most basic config parameters that you always have to touch. And of course the classic - "ident authentication failed" issue that hits everybody on RedHat or Debian platforms at least (which is most of the users - definitely in this crowd). It's hard to do much in 12 minutes, hopefully it got some people interested.

I followed that with a very very very short version of "what's coming up in 9.0". Once again, I focused on one of my personal favorite features, which is Exclusion Constraints. While this is often listed as one of the cool things in 9.0, sometimes I feel that too much focus is on streaming replication and hot standby. Don't get me wrong, these are very good and very much needed features. But Exclusion Constraints is a real eye-opener. All databases (including PostgreSQL, of course) have replication - this is "just another way to do it". Yes, a very important and good way to do it, but it's still not something brand new. Exclusion Constraints is something that's fundamentally new. And it's a brilliant example of how PostgreSQL is moving the goalposts forward. Oh, and it's really useful and cool, of course! (and it'll be even better when we have the period datatype, or something similar, in 9.1!)

In summary, I think it was a great event. Big thanks to all those who helped make it happen! Hopefully we can follow it up with many more in similar ways - perhaps mixing these many-short-talks with some more focused discussions on specific areas or technologies. Time will tell...

*Update*: For those who asked, there were somewhere around 150 people in the sessions.

Summary of feedback from FOSDEM devroom

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:55:00 +0000

I forgot completely to close up the feedback system for our talks at FOSDEM and post the feedback to the speakers. My apologies to all speakers and others who were interested! Thankfully, Marc Balmer reminded me today and the individual ratings for different speakers have been sent off to them.

When it comes to the aggregated statistics, they look fairly similar to what we saw at PGDay. The number of speakers were much lower, and unfortunately so were the number of people giving feedback. But in the end, the results were fairly clear. I am especially happy with the level of knowledge in the speakers we attract. Let's start with the graphs:

Breaking down the details, I think this shows a great quality of our speakers:

Name	Speaker Quality	Votes	Deviation
Simon Riggs	4.8	6	0.4
Magnus Hagander	4.6	5	0.5
David Fetter	4.5	4	1
Heikki Linnakangas	4.3	9	0.9
Dave Page	4.2	10	1.0
Marc Balmer	3.4	5	1.7
Peter Eisentraut	3.3	7	1.0

And the level of their knowledge is even higher:

Name	Speaker Knowledge	Votes	Deviation
Simon Riggs	5	6	0
Magnus Hagander	5	5	0
Heikki Linnakangas	5	9	0
David Fetter	4.8	4	0.5
Dave Page	4.3	10	1.1
Peter Eisentraut	4.3	7	1.1
Marc Balmer	3.6	5	1.7

Even at the bottom of this list, the numbers are very good! Unfortunately, the fairly low number of votes give a high deviation at the bottom of the chart.

For next time, we'd really like to get more people to leave their feedback. Does anybody have a good idea on how to make that happen?

Important updates for PostgreSQL Europe

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:42:00 +0000

Those of you who were at FOSDEM, heard my bold announcement that we will finally get off the ground and hold proper elections fort he board of PostgreSQL Europe, per a decision made the day before. Now, when we got home and read up on the statutes that govern the organization, it turns out we actually can't do that. The way forward that we've found around this, is to actually change the statutes to make these things possible.

To change the statutes, we need a majority of the General Assembly, made out of the active members, to agree on a change. It turns out that given how the statues are formed, there are currently only four members in PostgreSQL Europe, and these four members are the original board. Because of this, it was pretty easy to change the statutes (we only needed 3 of these people to agree, which we all did). And this we have done. The reason for changing them is to make sure we can get a working system going where we have more people involved. But in order to make that work, we first had to make this small-group decision.

The changes have just been published to www.postgresql.eu, and should show up any minute there. The changes that have been made are:

We have removed the definition of "Benefactor members", to keep things simple. We are keeping Active and Honorary members.
Created a membership fee, to control who is a member.
Change so that any resignations are handled by the Board, not the President, to make things more flexible.
Add that a membership is terminated if the fee isn't paid.
Added mailinglist as an approved way to do meetings. Since this is how we do most of our communicating, it made no sense not to have it on there.
Moved the budget out of the GA, it's just a tool for the executive board. Keeps down the paperwork.
Add a defined way for the GA to vote on issues, using a web based system (to be developed).
Since we will be voting over the internet, remove the ability to vote by proxy.

As you can see, the main change is the creation of a membership fee. This is the most controversial change. The idea here is that it will be a nominal fee (€10 for two years of membership - though that exact amount isn't part of the statutes, to keep flexibility). This will make it possible for us to have an actual membership list, which will be the grounds for who can vote.

The current method for handling membership requires the signing and sending around of forms on paper (yes! Actual dead trees!). Given how our organization works, this simply does not work. That is the main driver behind us changing this.

We did evaluate several other ways to deal with membership, ranging from things like requiring physical meetings (not really a good idea for a pan-European organization) to fancy PGP signing schemes (which really is way too complex for a lot of people). Our conclusion was that this was at least the least bad way to do it.

We are going to build on this shortly with more information about exactly how the elections are going to be held. The plan is still to have completed this years election before the summer, and we are well on track to make that goal.

The changes to the English statutes are of course available in our git repository. The binding french changes will be made shortly.

If you have any changes or comments, please direct them at the pgeu-general@postgresql.org mailinglist, or directly contact the board.

Time management by (somebody elses) press-releases

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:07:00 +0000

A while back I submitted a couple of talks for PG-East 2010 in Philly, and over the past couple of weeks I've been nagging the organizers semi-frequently to get some pre-info on whether I've been accepted or not, since flight prices started to climb fairly rapidly. The site clearly says information that the information will be available on Feb 15th, so I can't really complain that the answer kept being "don't know yet".

A couple of days ago, I got a note from Dave pinged me with a message asking if I was approved. Turns out this press-release had been posted (by his company, no less). Which explicitly names me as a speaker at the conference.

Took me two more days of chasing down JD, but I now have confirmation I'll be there. I don't actually know what I'll be speaking about, but it's a pretty safe bet it will be PostgreSQL related.

I call this Time management by press releases. If I could only get it to apply to all meetings, I would no longer need to keep my own calendar up to date.

So, I'll see you in Philly!