Talk Descriptions
Description:
Has all the hype got you jazzed to develop Ruby on Rails applications
on PostgreSQL? Is virtually everything you find about Rails MySQL-
specific? Come to this talk to learn all you need to know to make
Rails and PostgreSQL work together harmoniously. Topics will likely
include:
- The ins and outs of Rails migrations
- How to add support for foreign key constraints
- Managing partial indexes and other PostgreSQL-specific objects
- Working with views
- Monkey patching for fun and profit
- Supporting multi-column primary keys
- The joys and pains of Rails collections
- Working with time zones
- The antiquity of the Ruby PostgreSQL driver
- Enforcing constraints in Rails *and* in the database
- Getting Rails to execute *your* queries instead of its own
- Saved queries for "fat models"
Biography:
David E. Wheeler is CTO of Portland-based Values of n, creators of
the newly launched PostgreSQL-and-Rails-powered iwantsandy.com, home
of Sandy, your personal email assistant. David is also maintainer and
lead developer of Bricolage, a content management and publishing
system powered by Perl and PostgreSQL. For his next trick, he may or
may not build a Python or Lisp or BASIC-powered Web application, but
whatever it is, it will likely be built on PostgreSQL. Unless it's a
blog, in which case he'll just use SQLite.
Description:
Middleware technologies provide a means to build highly available and
scalable database clusters using off-the-shelf PostgreSQL database
servers. This talk starts with an overview of middleware cluster
architectures using Continuent's commercial uni/cluster product as an
example. We then present clustered PostgreSQL performance numbers
using specialized benchmark tools we have developed and plan to
release shortly into open source. The talk will conclude with some
lessons for how to improve horizontal scaling of PostgreSQL,
including plans for a new open source offering that we hope will be
of interest to many PostgreSQL users.
Biography:
Robert Hodges is CTO of Continuent, where he has worked since early
2006. He has extensive experience with databases, including 7 years
working at Sybase on object oriented databases and transactional
messaging. He has also built and operated large hosted web
applications on enterprise databases. Robert is currently
responsible for all aspects of Continuent's technical strategy.
Description:
This talk will describe the query execution techniques implemented by
PostgreSQL. In most database systems, queries are first parsed, then
optimized (planned), and finally executed. This talk will describe the
design and implementation of the query executor, the final stage in that
process. The query executor is responsible for taking the query plan
produced by the optimizer, and executing the physical operations
described by the plan in an efficient manner.
Specific topics will likely include:
- a brief summary of the lifecycle of a query in PostgreSQL and the role of the query optimizer
- the "iterator model", which is the interface used to communicate data and exchange control flow in the query executor
- scan evaluation
- basic sequential and index scans
- bitmap scans
- predicate evaluation
- materialization
- evaluating subqueries and set-returning functions
- join evaluation
- nested loops, hash joins, sort-merge joins
- outer joins
- aggregate evaluation
- grouping via sorting
- grouping via hashing
- how to understand the output of EXPLAIN
Biography:
Neil Conway has contributed to PostgreSQL since 2002, and has been a CVS
committer since 2003.
During that time, Neil has been a high school student, an intern at Red Hat, a university student, and an employee of Fujitsu Australia. Originally from Toronto, Neil recently completed his undergraduate degree in Computing Science at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He is currently a Sr. Software Engineer at Truviso, Inc. in the Bay Area, working on their PostgreSQL-based data stream management system.
Description:
A introduction to using system tools to identify what the system is
doing. This will go over using top and iostat to determine what the
system is physically doing, and then using tools like ps and querying
the PostgreSQL system catalog tables to determine what queries are
running, what locks have been acquired, and where the tables and
indexes are physically located on the system in order to correlate the
physical activity to what the database is doing.
Biography:
Mark Wong's experience includes TPC benchmarking and analyzing performance of database systems.
This work is licensed under a
Creative
Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
Description:
I will present a quick introduction to PostGIS in an example driven
format; I will not cover installing PostGIS, nor will I have much time
to cover making printable maps (though I hope to alluded to it at the
end). My presentation will consist of six sections. (1) An overview
of geographic databases: what vector geographic data is, how it is
stored, how it is represented in text, and what a projection is; I
will also touch on raster data, though we won't cover it in any
detail. (2) Then I will cover how to get data into a PostGIS
database: importing a shapefile and importing text data (from a
GPS?). (3) Then I will cover how PostGIS keeps track of the projection
of the data Ð the "SRID": what is, how to find it, how to set it.
(4) Then I will show three examples of queries on geographic data:
finding the distance and angle of points to various geographic
features, using non-geographic data that has a convenient join key
(zip code) to count points within polygons, and then an exploration of
several of queries that show off some of the functions in PostGIS. (5)
Then I will cover how to modify geographic data: adding rows, merging
polygons, creating lines from points, adding new derived geographic
columns, selecting into temporary tables, and possibly writing
triggers that manipulate geographic data. (6) We will end with how to
output geographic data: a Google mash-up, tables that can be used in
spreadsheets or statistical programs, viewing data with map programs
(QGIS), other command line tools for geographic data, and possibly
some talk on PostGIS as it works with mapserver.
Biography:
Webb Sprague is a Ph D student studying culture and family formation
in a small Oregon town. He uses PostgreSQL for his job (programmer in
the UC Berkeley Demography Department), and for storing population
data for his research. He has written several web-applications,
generally using Python, Postgres, Apache, and Linux. He has been a
PostgreSQL user for almost seven years.
Description:
IM IN UR DATABASE, USIN' LOTSA PLS
Biography:
David Fetter is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and has worked in
various commercial enterprises, non-profits and educational
institutions. He has worked extensively with Oracle, PostgreSQL,
MySQL, Perl, PHP, PL/SQL, PL/PgSQL, PL/Perl and (of course!) vim on
transaction processing and business intelligence systems.
In his free time, he brews beer, rides his bicycle, and helps run
several organizations for computer professionals including the San
Francisco Perl Users' Group and the San Francisco PostgreSQL Users'
Group.
Description:
PostgreSQL table partitioning allows you to scale your data to significantly
larger volumes than would otherwise be possible. Getting started with table
partitions in and of itself is not complicated, but if you want to get
maximum benefits from your setup you can't just follow the documentation.
This talk will walk through the ins and outs of table partitioning including:
- What table partitioning is, and how it is implemented in PostgreSQL.
- Rules, Constraints, Inheritance and how it all comes together.
- When and why to use triggers for partitioning.
- Automated partition maintenance.
Learn how to setup and maintain table partitioning in PostgreSQL with hands on examples. We'll walk through manipulating SQL, writing rules and trigger, and show you how you can use plpgsql to automate your partition maintenance.
Biography:
Robert Treat works as a database architect at open source powerhouse OmniTI.
Over the years he has run PostgreSQL operations in high-transactional OLTP
environments and large-scale (TB+) ODS systems, interfacing with a wide
variety of technology solutions pushing the boundaries on the traditional
ideas of LAMP systems. A veteran in the industry, Robert has spoken at many
industry conferences including OSCon, PGCon, and PHPWorks, and co-authored
the book Beginning PHP and PostgreSQL 8.