After a two-year break, I am again teaching a course at Drexel University. (This blog entry has details about the previous course offering.) Robert Haas and Michael Glaesemann are again helping as guest lecturers — many thanks to them.
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Teaching Again at DrexelToday, I fixed a problem. Or at least, I think I fixed it. Time will tell. But Thom Brown seems pretty happy, and so does Dan Farina. So let me tell you about it. Here’s the executive summary: assuming the patch I committed today holds up, PostgreSQL 9.3 will largely eliminate the need to fiddle with operating system shared memory limits.
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For the past five years, PGCon has hosted an invitation-only developer meeting before the official conference. I found it interesting to look at the previous group photos and meeting notes:
Images from 2012 and 2010 have all people identified, though when you click on the image to enlarge it, you lose the identifications. Year 2011 is an extra-wide version. In 2008, it seems we didn’t take a group picture, so I have chosen four images that show most attendees.
Postgres Developer Meetings If you are a Postgres speaker and are traveling somewhere on vacation, have you ever considered making a Postgres presentation at your vacation location? You might say, “I take vacations to get away from Postgres” — don’t let me ever hear such crazy talk! 
For example, six weeks before I left for a mission trip to the Dominican Republic, I sent an email to the advocacy list asking if anyone in the Dominican Republic would like to meet. (The mission trip blog has some humorous mentions of me.) I got a private reply that our public relations contact in that country would like a presentation or two. I ended up speaking to 85 students at a university in the Dominican city of Santiago.
What are the advantages of taking vacation time to present a talk about Postgres? Well, many of my most memorable travel experiences have been while as a guest of Postgres community members — a dacha in Russia, a cruise in Brazil, an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka. These are not typical tourist sites, but are easily accessible with local friends. Even ordinary locations, like an office building or restaurant in Tokyo, is special because you are living as a Japanese — not something most non-Japanese experience, even as tourists.
Vacation, What Vacation?If you are near Philadelphia, you are invited to attend the 2012 Postgres Pool Party at my home:
All Postgres users, developers, and groupies are invited, including their families. Please RSVP via email by July 30.
Postgres Pool PartyWith the list of Postgres committers recently updated, I wanted to mention a perplexing question I occasionally get from companies, “How can I become a committer?”. This is from companies that are just starting their contributions to Postgres and have never submitted a patch. It is a perplexing questions because, for Postgres, committers are people who have been around for years and have submitted many patches — obviously there are mismatched expectations here.
The cause is that these new companies are equating Postgres with open source communities with hundreds of committers, where you have to be a committer to get anything significant done. The Postgres work-flow (diagram) forces all work through community email lists, and a small group of committers apply patches agreed-upon by the group. So, for Postgres, committing is a mechanical process, not a control process, i.e. contributor ≠ committer.
Companies looking to measure their success in the Postgres community should not focus on committer count, but on the number of release note items and blog entries mentioning their work. I hope this helps companies adjust easier to the Postgres way of doing things.
So You Want to Be a Committer?Object Identifiers (oids) were added to Postgres as a way to uniquely identify database objects, e.g. rows, tables, functions, etc. It is part of Postgres’s
object-relational heritage.
Because oids where assigned to every data row by default, and were only four-bytes in size, they were increasingly seen as unnecessary. In Postgres 7.2 (2002), they were made optional, and in Postgres 8.1 (2005), after much warning, oids were no longer assigned to user tables by default. They are still used by system tables, and can still be added to user tables using the with oids clause during create table. Server parameter default_with_oids controls the default mode for table creation (defaults to “false”).
Oids as still used extensively for system table rows, and are used to join system tables, e.g.:
What Are OidsWhile the English language is somewhat fluid in its use of single and double quotation marks, sql is very rigid: single quotes are used to delimit text strings, and double quotes can be used to delimit identifiers. What are sql identifiers? They identify an sql object, e.g. if you create a table, the table name and column names are identifiers.
Double quoting identifiers is usually optional, so either of these is valid:
CREATE TABLE my_table (a INTEGER);
CREATE TABLE "my_table" ("a" INTEGER);
The Double Quote Trap This is also one type of thing in which people are very interested. How to create probes other than PEM inbuilt probe? And how to create alert based on probe? Well answer is simple. Understand what probe is in PEM …
Creating user probe and alert in PEM 2.1Having just attended the Southeast LinuxFest, I was reminded of the elements that make a great conference site:
The Southeast LinuxFest location met all of these criteria, but that is rare — only one-third of conferences I attend meet these criteria, and when these criteria are not met, you feel it.
When the primary hotel is not connected to the conference, attendees have to take everything with them to the conference because they can’t easily return to their rooms, and once they return to their rooms at night, it is often hard to get them to go out. Expensive hotels often drastically reduce attendee count because many attendees must pay for conference expenses with personal funds. Conferences not near food and attractions often lack the fun evening outings that attendees remember long after the conference ends.
What Makes a Great Conference Site
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