I attended PG East in New York City this year. It was my first PostgreSQL conference. My primary objective for the trip was to meet with colleagues, customers and business partners. I was able to do all these things as well as attend several excellent talks and training sessions. By every possible measure, the event was a great experience. I met with the folks I wanted to meet with, made some new friends and business partners, attend some excellent training sessions and talks, and was challenged in a way I didn’t expect, specifically to create a Boston PostgreSQL Users Group (a BPUG if you will).

During the conference a map was displayed that showed all PostgreSQL users groups in the United States. Boston MA, where I was born and have lived the past 28 years was noticeably missing. Upon seeing this, I decided it was time to start the Boston area PostgreSQL users group.

On May 24th we had the first meet of the Boston Area PUG. We had 23 people attend from about 12 different companies. Ed Boyajian spoke about the status and recent growth of PostgreSQL. In addition,  a great local company (TripAdvisor) spoke about their large scale PostgreSQL deployment.

For those of you who are interested in attending our next meeting, please see this URL: http://pugs.postgresql.org/bospug

Ultimately, what I really want to share is my journey starting this group.

I started by asking Bruce Momjian for the formula to start a PUG. He gave me the first two steps and subsequently coached me through out the process. Here are those first two steps:

1. Send e-mail to pgsql-announce@postgresql.org announcing the time and location of the meeting.
2. Post the event on the PostgreSQL Events site.

So that is what I did. Over the next several days I received seven responses from pgsql-announce mail that I had sent. However, things began to speed up when I sent a note to the ex-odi mailing list. ODI, stands for Object Design Inc. This was a great Boston based company that I worked at in the early and mid-90s. We made the world’s greatest Object Database and the company was loaded with top technical talent. It was eventually acquired by Progress Software however along the way it’s alumni created and participated in many Boston area companies. From the message I sent to the alumni group, I received about ½ dozen responses from people who wanted to come to our PostgreSQL user group meeting. However, what really kicked it up into high gear was a response from Amrith Kumar. Prior to the user group meeting, I had never met Amrith. Turns out he is starting a company with my former boss and office mate at ODI: Ken Rugg. Amrith was very anxious to help and began suggesting additional things for us to do to organize the event and promote attendance. Some of his specific suggestions were using meetup.com and eventbright.com.

I didn’t realize until that moment sites like this have become the cornerstones for user group meetings. We publicized our first meeting via Event Bright. It was great and easy to work with. It was fun to watch people sign up and the list of attendees grow over the course of several weeks. However, it turns out the meetup.com in what is most commonly used by PostgreSQL User Groups. Therefore, we have switched to using it going forward. If you are interested, see if you can find us on meetup.com. If not please let me know (tom.kincaid@enterprisedb.com).

The next big break was when Don O’Neill, who had recently become the Director of Engineering at Trip Advisor, contacted me. He was very anxious to get involved and help. I immediately asked him to speak about their PostgreSQL deployment at TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor has been using PostgreSQL for a mission critical deployment and profitable deployment for many years. In addition, their head quarters are in the Boston area.

While this was all coming together, in the background I connected with Selena Deckelmann who helped get us set up on pugs.postgresql.org.

As mentioned previously, the speakers were great. However, what I found surprising was how much I enjoyed the team spirit of the event. Everybody wanted to figure out how to make the group a successful learning and networking venture for all of us. Some people were offering ideas for future topics they could present on and other people were offering to host the meeting. Gurjeet Singh, a high powered EDB PostgreSQL consultant / PostgreSQL hacker / EDB Product developer set up a Facebook group and a twitter tag. We had begun a new journey together to be a successful Boston based PUG.

I wish you luck on your journey starting your own PUG and for those of you in the Boston area, I hope you will join us. We meet the second Tuesday of every month. Our next meeting is July 12th, 2011. Bruce has agreed to drop by and speak about the Query Planner.

True statement – Microsoft is now one of PostgreSQL’s largest users.

Last week it was announced that Microsoft is buying Skype for a reported $8.5 billion in cash. What was not reported in this recent acquisition news cycle is an interesting fact — Skype runs on the open source database PostgreSQL. Since Microsoft has a SQL database of its own – SQL Server – it’s a fair question to ask if this is the beginning of the end of Skype on PostgreSQL?

There’s more than a few ways to speculate on what Microsoft plans to do with the database infrastructure of Skype. Some argue that the prospects for generating revenue off Skype far outweigh having Skype be a poster-child deployment for SQL Server. With making money as the first priority, Microsoft may never be motivated to migrate from PostgreSQL to SQL Server.

Another valid argument is that most users will never know nor care what database is behind Skype as long as it works well. Just look at the current news cycle – there are thousands of articles, blogs, radio and TV outlets reporting on this story. I could not find a single report that mentions PostgreSQL in the context of the Skype acquisition news. Given the low public profile of PostgreSQL at Skype, Microsoft doesn’t need to answer yet about the irony of their new purchase running on open source PostgreSQL and not on Microsoft SQL Server.

What do you think? Is this the beginning of the end of Skype running on PostgreSQL?

First, OK, yeah I know … this is the third blog entry in a row on our site about PostgreSQL being mentioned in an tech article. But I thought it was important to call out for two reasons. One, it’s in CIO magazine which is meaningful because it shows how PostgreSQL has worked itself to the top of the food chain in IT organizations. And two, the article presents a nice case study of a state government agency that demonstrates the industrial-strength capabilities of PostgreSQL:

“The court system in the US state of Wisconsin is using some 100 PostgreSQL databases for the core application used by 72 county circuit courts. About 3000 users directly connect to the production databases in the various court houses and there are dozens of Web applications receiving millions of hits each day.”

Not too shabby, eh?