Heading west, going east, better schedule, and more

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:47:56 +0000

(public service announcement further down!)

I'm starting to get ready for the most mis-named conference so far this year. I mean, seriously. It's called East 2010, and yet it's located approximately 6000 km (that's almost 4000 miles for you Americans) to the west of the prime meridian. That's not even close. Sure, it's to the east of where the West conference is usually held, but really, this reminds me of POSIX timezones...

This will be a somewhat different conference than previous PostgreSQL conferences. It's the first big commercial conference. This has enabled it to change venue from "local university or college where rooms are cheap or free" to a conference hotel in downtown Philadelphia. Whether this is actually good for the talks is yet to be seen, but it's likely going to make some things around the conference easier and more integrated. There will also be a exhibition area - something we have tried for pgday.eu without much interest, but it will hopefully be more successful in this surrounding.

The contents of the conference are also somewhat different, since there is now a clear focus also on "decision makers", something that many PostgreSQL conferences have been lacking in. We may all want it to be true that the decision makers are the people who are actually going to use the product, but we know that's not true. This gives a conference schedule that contains a broader range of talks than we're used to - this can only be good.

Myself, I will be giving an updated version of my security talk, focusing on authentication and SSL. The updates are mainly around the new and changed authentication methods in 9.0, and some minor updates on the SSL part. If you've seen it before it may be an interesting refresher, but you might be better off going to see Greg Smith's benchmarking talk if you haven't...

Now for the second part, which is the public service announcement...

If you're like me, you find the official schedule for East very hard to read and basically useless to get an overview. It's also horrible to use from a device like the iPhone, something I'm quite likely to use at the conference. But we solved this problem for the PostgreSQL Europe conferences, and that code is pretty simple. So some copy/paste of a couple of hundred lines of python, some glue code, and voilà, a much more (IMHO) readable schedule. As a bonus, it also generates an aggregate iCalendar feed, that you can plug directly into the calendar application on the iPhone (or I assume most other phones). Google calendar may be very nice to use to work on the schedule, but I find this a lot more user friendly for those reading it - particularly in the ability to get an overview.

The page and the feed will both update once per hour by pulling from the official calendar feeds. They will also adjust for the fact that all the official feeds are 3 hours off due to the calendars being set in the wrong timezone. So should they suddenly jump 3 hours that's because the official ones were fixed - just remind me and I'll take out the adjustment. Anybody is free to use them, but of course, usual disclaimers apply, double check with the official one, etc, etc, etc.

Finally, then mandatory before

and after

shots.

If you're interested in the code for the aggregator itself, it's up on my github page. And of course, any patches for cool features or just making it look better are always appreciated - it's open source after all.

pgcon, 1st talk day

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:37:39 +0000

We're now up to the third day of pgcon, the first one of the actual conference - the previous ones being dedicated to tutorials. The day started with Selena, me and Dave doing a semi-improvised keynote. Well, it started with Dan saying welcome and going through some details, but he doesn't count... I doubt we actually spread any knowledge with that talk, but at least we got to plug some interesting talks at the conference, and show pictures of elephants.

Missed the start of the Aster talk on Petabyte databases using standard PostgreSQL, but the parts I caught sounded very interesting. I'm especially excited to hear they are planning to contribute a whole set of very interesting features back to core PostgreSQL. This makes a lot of sense since they're building their scaling on standard PostgreSQL and not a heavily modified one like some other players in the area, and it's very nice to see that they are realizing this.

After this talk, it was time for my own talk on PostgreSQL Encryption. I had a hard time deciding the split between pgcrypto and SSL when I made the talk, but I think it came out fairly well. Had a number of very good questions at the end, so clearly some people were interested. Perhaps even Bruce managed to learn something...

After this we had lunch, and I'm now sitting in Greg Smiths talk about benchmarking hardware. This is some very low level stuff compared to what you usually see around database benchmarking, but since this is what sits underneath the database, it's important stuff. And very interesting.

The rest of the day has a lineup of some very nice talks, I think. So there'll be no sitting around in the hallway! And in the evening there is the EnterpriseDB party, of course!

Yesterday had the developer meeting, where a bunch (~20) of the most active developers that are here in Ottawa sat down together for the whole day to discuss topics around the next version of PostgreSQL, and how our development model works. Got some very important discussions started, and actually managed to get agreement on a couple of issues that have previously been going in circles. All in all, a very useful day.

Magnus Hagander's PostgreSQL blog (Entries tagged as ssl)

Heading west, going east, better schedule, and more

pgcon, 1st talk day