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Surprising events from a top 20 list

In a completely unscientific review of community popularity I was reviewing the active members of various channels on #freenode. For those that don't know, Freenode is the defacto destination for the Open Source community on IRC. This is where you will find official community support channels for such open source luminaries as #gentoo, #ubuntu, #mysql and of course #postgresql. The List
  1. Ubuntu
  2. Gentoo
  3. Linux
  4. Debian
  5. Python
  6. ArchLinux
  7. Django
  8. Haskell
  9. Perl …

Long Running Request Handlers and Python Garbage Collection

While working on a Simpycity + Pylons environment the other day, I noticed that my app was leaking Postgres connection handles. This is not behaviour you ever want to see, especially in software as vital as Simpycity. Investigation and testing demonstrated pretty conclusively here, and here that the Python garbage collector was not immediately cleaning up dead/unreferenced objects. Specifically, in the test case below,

 def foo():
      r = Raw("SELECT count(*) …

My turn on Oracle purchasing Sun.

I feel like I am coming late to this topic. All the pundits have already had there say and the blogosphere has been rampant. I have been talking with a lot of MySQL folks lately, encouraging them to at least test PostgreSQL as an alternative. MySQL folks are nervous. They don't like the opportunity Oracle brings to the table. This morning I was asked quite bluntly, "From your perspective what …

The great netbook giveaway

At PostgreSQL Conference East, Platinum Sponsor EnterpriseDB raffled two Netbooks. This is the video of the raffle (only 5 minutes). Of particular interest is a certain Major Contributors response.

Escaping data madness

We had an interesting issue crop up this past week. The question was, "How do we properly escape the following string...?". The string was:
You can't have it that way can you?
That seems like a pretty simple string right? On insert you would do one of the following:
   (E'You can\'t have it that way can you?');
   ($$You can't have it that way can you?$$);
   ('You can''t have it that …

Registration closing for PostgreSQL Conference East

As a reminder for all of those in our community that like to register at the last minuted (that means most of us), registration will be closing on Wednesday April first. On line registration is much easier than registering at the door so please bounce on over to PostgreSQL.us/purchase and get your registration in.

PostgreSQL Training

Command Prompt has offered training since we began as a one man shop back in 1997. It has always been, "by request". Since that time a lot of things have changed and we are regularly receiving training requests from multiple companies. We have decided to finally bring our training into the light and make it a forefront of the services that CMD offers. Interestingly we are going to be providing …

PostgreSQL Conference East: Final Schedule announced

PostgreSQL Conference East is the Eastern segment of the United States PostgreSQL Conference series. The event is being held at Drexel University. It starts on April 3rd and runs through April 5. We kick the conference off on April 3rd with three sessions. For DBAs we have Mastering PostgreSQL Administration a four hour training, presented by PostgreSQL Core Team member Bruce Momjian. For Developers we have a Database Normalization, a …

More PostgreSQL Conference goodness, West 08 Keynote

This is the Keynote I gave at West 08 last October. Topics include updates on the various non-profits, reach out to tertiary communities, recognition of the importance of non direct PostgreSQL participation as well as many others (such as 8.4 and replication). Those interested in participating in the upcoming East should visit here and register.
Can we do anything more in 6 months?

Slides

Remembering excellence from past PostgreSQL Conferences

Just about 5 months ago we held PostgreSQL Conference, West 2008 in Portland Oregon. It was a very successful conference with approximate 20% growth over the previous West in 2007. It was also a three day conference over the previous West event which was a single day conference. As we prep to hold PostgreSQL Conference, East 2009 at Drexel University I wanted to look back at one of my favorite …