I’ve been organizing and putting on events since about 2006. I first started with a simple event called Utah Code Camp. That grew from a first-time 50-person event to over 800+ people in 2018. Takes a while to grow a community!
I was inspired at my first PASS summit back in 2004 to put on events and help build community. I will be presenting at the PASS summit hoping to inspire others! Right now It will be presented at the PASS Summit on Nov 6th(Wednesday) 2-3 pm Room 337-339. I will be presenting this again really soon to a user group or meetup and then I’ll record the presentation and post it on YouTube for all to see.
I intend some more follow-up blog posts as well breaking this down into smaller sections. For now, you can find the documents/guides on putting on events on this Page.
I also HIGHLY recommend checking out the other links on that page. Jeff and Daniel have put together amazing resources as well!
If you need assistance putting on an event or help getting started let me know! I would love to schedule a quick call and help you out. You can reach out through my Calendar at this link.
Hopefully, I will see you at the PASS Summit next week!
I recently attended the Postgresql NYC 2024 conference. I should be clear that I presented at this event and helped organize/plan it. Any organizer will tell you that when you volunteer with events you frequently cannot attend many of the sessions at the event. You have a lot of other tasks that take up time and keep you from attending sessions. I was unable to attend many sessions but listed below are the key points I obtained from the event.
Session: Latest Developments in Postgresql By Amit Kapila,
I was very happy slides were made available for this session, I took LOTS of notes because it was a good listing of all the new things in PG17. But the slides do a much better job of summarizing all of it, I highly recommend reviewing them. Here are the key items that I am interested in right now.
Incremental backups, I come from the SQL Server world and these were normal things we did all the time. This would help my larger Databases. I am worried about implementation and pg_combine to bring them back together but I’ll do more testing to determine how well this works in the future.
Optimizing Tuples, Wal volume, and Vacuum processes. These are listed separately but I see them all related and all good things for my future uses of the PG database.
SLRU cache and performance improvements. This has been a problem for our current system and I’m eager to find out more about this improvement.
Logical Replication, Sync/Failover slots. Allowing replication on followers is going to be a big game changer in a lot of systems and I’m looking forward to testing it and finding what works for the current system I am working with. I can see plenty of use cases for this in the future.
Logical Decoding speeds up Subtransactions, Another big one for the current system I am working with. We have some slowdowns for Logical Replication so this will help greatly.
Trigger on Login event/connection time. This could have huge usage in some of the Audit items and things that we want to do related to users connecting.
Lightning Talks:
One presentation in the Lightning talks had a great one-liner that I wrote down and I want to use in future presentations.
“Celebrate Effort and not just output”
This is a good reminder that we need to celebrate failure, Just because something didn’t work the way you wanted or didn’t happen the way you expected it’s no reason to not celebrate what you have learned. I have a presentation on Failure I’ve presented in the past and I should add this to the presentation.
Christine Momjian
Is an amazing volunteer and member of the community, she provided a wonderful message to remind us all to remember we are a community and need to be supporting and helping others in the community as much as possible. She is pushing for not only more ways to connect with others but also to have a committee that can find more ways to help others in the community. I love to see things like this so we can continue to grow and benefit the Pg community.
My session: How to Never be on call as a DBA again.
I had a larger crowd than the last time I presented. I was right after lunch as well so keeping everyone awake was a challenge. It went much better than the first run and we had some good discussion around the topic. I did get called out saying that the presentation isn’t about “never” being on call again. It’s more about how to improve your on-call time. Which I fully agree with but this title will appeal to getting people into the session.
Things to improve
Add specific slides for jokes around what people “think” the presentation is about. Retiring is not the only option.
Slide order is much better now keep it the way it is.
Add slides/talk about Large companies vs small companies on call.
Add slides/talk about lone DBA vs larger DBA teams.
Add slides/talk around compliance and regulation for documentation.
I had lots of good discussions in the hallway track, most revolving around the sponsors of the event. I organize and manage the sponsors for these events so I make sure to understand what is and what is not working for them. I also focus on future events so they can plan budgets accordingly. I am hopeful right now that I will be able to have PG conf NYC ready to start signing contracts before the PASS Summit in November. That is aggressive to have it ready to go but it’s the goal right now.
It was an amazing event in NYC and I am excited for the next event! I feel like we have really started growing the community and I’m looking forward to continuing that growth in many more events! I hope to see you at a future event!
This will serve as my review of the SQL Saturday Denver 2024 Event.
Overall Event
Well put on, Great communication from the organizers. I knew where to be as a speaker and as an attendee.
Good networking and conversations with attendees. I should have followed up a little better and given out more cards(yes I’m old school and still use business cards).
Not sure about attendance numbers but it felt like a good number starting the day. We lost some people after lunch simply because lunch wasn’t available on-site.
Huge thanks to the Organizers of the event. They did a great job!
Sessions
Mastering Postgresql Advanced Techniques
Speaker: Ramesh Kumar Venkatraman
This presentation made some good comparisons between Postgresql and SQL Server.
Key takeaways
Datatype comparisons were good, Be weary of Money data type when you move from SQL To PG. This one will get you.
Comparison of Transaction Isolation levels was good I enjoyed that.
Case Sensitivity is a key thing for PG and not in SQL Server. I liked that this was mentioned. I’ve been forgetting to put it on my slides about conversion and it’s an important key point to remember.
Things to Improve.
Focused on Inheritance at the start, For me, that hasn’t come up a ton so I was thrown off that it was the first point to bring up.
The first few slides focused on everything that PG could do that SQL Server could not. Since this was much more a crowd moving from SQL to PG it might be better to focus on a feature in SQL Server and show how to do it in PG. This was done with datatypes and other items but a few slides were all about things that PG did that SQL Server did not.
Maximizing Organizational Potential: The Essential Role of Data Strategy
Speaker: Cher Fox
Great overview and discussion of the concept of a Data Strategy. A lot of points in this presentation were for a much larger company/group but the points were solid and could still be used in the smaller companies as long as you understood the concepts. I enjoyed the discussion in this session.
Key takeaways:
Presentation Stated with Why! I love it when presentations tell you why this is important.
Loved the mention that Data Strategy is the Backbone of ML, AI, and all the other aspects of Data path. If you can implement and solidify a strategy then doing any other data aspect makes things easier.
Setting goals is important and it’s important to get your stakeholders to help decide those goals. Executive level is important to help set the goals and metrics that are needed for the data strategy
Data Strategies drive growth and revenue. The better the strategy and more understood the better chance you are going to grow and receive more revenue.
Data culture is important. Making everyone a Data Steward helps to have quality data in the backend. Quality data makes everything cost less and move faster.
If you are in a startup, don’t be afraid to change your Strategy often and fail fast to find what works for you.
Things to Improve:
Wordy slides, Lots and lots of information on the slides. Cher did a great job speaking to them but I felt like it was really busy in a lot of slides.
Boil down to more stories and key points. I feel like this tried to tell you everything you needed for the Strategy and with only 60 minute session that wasn’t going to happen. I think telling more stories about how and why you need these strategies/goals and how they changed the company would be best. I know this was a session geared for the summit so it makes sense it would have a lot of content.
Importance of Postgresql Vacuum, Tuning to Optimize Database Performance
Speaker: Suyog Pagare
This was a good overall discussion of Vacuum, I knew most of the key points here already so I was attending mostly to see if I was missing anything and to see how the presentation was laid out for future use.
Key points:
Every DB needs Maintenance, Couldn’t agree more. Let’s make sure they all get it!
Bloat,
Caused by inserts/updates of data. Going to happen no matter what. If it’s excessive check your insert/update patterns.
Symptoms of the problem, are higher disk usage, slower queries, and bad overall performance.
Identify, through bloat queries, Available here and here.
Make a plan to deal with it and manage it via a schedule
Good Overview on Transaction Wrap around and what to look for.
Set up alerts around the numbers and make sure to monitor it.
Review your parameters around work_mem and parallel processes on the vacuum. It is important to know if the AutoVacuum is meeting your needs.
Pg_Repack, Great utility/tool for rebuilding tables/indexes. Should use it to handle bloat items.
Things to Improve:
Overall this was a good overview of all the options around Vacuum and what was needed. The only suggestion I had was for the presenter to slow down a little and perhaps pause to ask questions.
The last 2 sessions of the day I presented. Here is the feedback I received for my sessions. Some of this is the feedback I have for myself.
How to: Never be on call as a DBA!
Key points
Focus on documentation and training others so they can be prepared to handle anything that comes up.
This can greatly improve your career and help you in lots more ways than just not getting phone calls.
If you want Peace and Quiet you should focus on something like this.
First time giving this presentation so I need to move around a few slides/talking points.
The title was confusing for some, thinking they were going to get the ultimate scripts to fix all problems. I need to work on the title.
I need to work on the stories. I think they were not as concise as I would have liked. Since this was the first time run of this presentation I expected that. I need to present it a few more times to improve this.
Postgresql For the SQL Server DBA
Key points.
Showed the first 7 days of being an accidental DBA. Aka you were just handed a PG Database and said “Fix it”
Showed general 101-level items to get started with Postgres.
Got into some key OS level and system level differences about PG vs SQL Server.
Things to Improve.
This is a very high level and needs some more deep-dive aspects.
Add a slide/info about Case Sensitivity
Need to update it since it was written 4 years ago and some of these things are not as applicable now as before.
Might retire this one or re-write it since I think most have gotten around the basic information I present here.
Sql Insane Asylum (A Blog by Pat Wright) 