First, PG East is shaping up to be a big conference:

• The conference agenda looks very full, with both developer and business-oriented talks. The business-oriented focus is rather new for Postgres conferences, and I think signals more mainstream adoption of Postgres.
• It is at the Warwick Hotel. This lobby photo should give you a good idea of how nice the hotel is — we will simply have to adjust to having a Postgres conference in a fancy hotel.
• Noel Yuhanna of Forrester Research will be speaking. He is the person who authored last year’s Forrester Wave report that found Ingres and MySQL as the leading open source databases (news report). You can judge for yourself how much “research” went into that report, but we will be nice to him — a bodyguard will be unnecessary.

Registrations are now being accepted. There is a useful “Reasons to Attend” page that will help people who are undecided.

Second, it looks like I will be co-teaching a database class at Drexel University again this summer, but this time, a new, more advanced class that will highlight Postgres technology. Drexel wants to expand their database offerings and train skilled Postgres engineers. Postgres certainly offers students a unique opportunity to understand database technology.

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All the students had heard of Postgres and knew of its reputation. They all used Postgres for homework assignments, including one that required writing an application that connected to Postgres. No one had major problems, which is a good indication that our one-click installers are easy for new users.

Though the course is over, I am still on the Drexel faculty and will probably be involved in database and open source activities there in the future.

I was immediately beside myself with excitement, if OpenOffice base had the ability to draw forms like MS Access, and will let me hook it up to my existing postgres DB, then I may be done with an interface before the flight deck signals ‘initial approach’.

First step was to get the JDBC driver registered with OpenOffice base, and then to get connected to my existing database.  I had a feeling that somewhere along the way, Alice and her long eared friend might be waiting, but I figured that company might be welcome so, what they heck, let’s go!

Choosing JDBC from the drop-down and hitting next took me to the ‘Database Wizard’

My first test, just adding the postgres jdbc driver class ‘org.postgresql.Driver’ (note the capital ‘D’) was a failure, so I figured I’d have to get the postgres jdbc driver added to the classpath.

I canceled the wizard, and opened up OpenOffice writer, went to my options page (On the mac, this is ‘OpenOffice.org’ menu -> Preferences ; everywhere else, it’s ‘Tools -> Options’).  Next, I went to ‘java’ and clicked the ‘Class Path’ button, the window that popped up let me add the postgres jdbc jar file without any problems:

I went back to ‘base’ , and when I tested my driver again, the test was a success!

Now, continuing on our journey, I added the connection string for my database (as per the usual postgres connection string: http://jdbc.postgresql.org/documentation/83/connect.html)

On the next screen, I entered my authentication information (for info on postgres authentication and the pg_hba.conf file, see http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/auth-methods.html).  I successfully tested my connection, and on the last screen let OpenOffice register the database for me (aka ‘Saved an ODB file) and opened it for editing.

Once opened, I was amazed that not only did OpenOffice.org successfully get my existing tables, it organized them by postgres schema!  I was sure that my somewhat overly organizational nature (i.e. keeping all my tables grouped by postgres schema) would not translate well, but the OO.org team did not let me down, incredible!

So far, I’ve had some great luck, but my skeptical nature still told me that there would be some problem coming up, and as always, the universe didn’t disappoint.  I double clicked one of my tables and was ready to start entering data ‘Access style’ and found that my tables were all read-only.

I always need that my head-first dive down the rabbit hole would end-up with me staring into the floating eyes of the cheshire cat, I just hoped that it wouldn’t be this time.  Oh well.  Needless to say, I didn’t meet the self-imposed deadline of ‘initial approach’, and I actually ended up receiving the ’scorn of the flight attendant’ when I did not swiftly stow the laptop until I felt the ka-chunk of the landing gear deploying.

Once on the ground at EWR, I found my way into the Terminal C food court, got my chicken nuggets and whipped out my good ‘ol air card.  Once online, my googling for the read-only table fiasco came about with mixed results.  It seemed that the majority of links dealt with some strange issue with the openoffice JDBC system needing to be instructed to ‘ignoreDriverPrivileges’ (http://dba.openoffice.org/howto/IgnoreDriverPrivileges.html).  None of these magic ‘macros’ seemed to work.  So, I posted in the OpenOffice forums (http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=21036) and within 45 minutes, had my answer, it seems that your external database (here, PostgreSQL) should have primary key on each table in order for it to be updateable via OO.org’s base.

I pulled up my psql window and ran:

postgres=# alter table a.bob add primary key (id);
NOTICE:  ALTER TABLE / ADD PRIMARY KEY will create implicit index "bob_pkey" for table "bob"
ALTER TABLE

I re-opened the a.bob table in OO.org (didn’t even have to close the ODB file) and voila!

I was slightly worried that I’d be required to have a surrogate key on each of my tables, which isn’t always bad, but in trying to stick with (http://hosting3.epresence.tv/fosslc/1/watch/125.aspx (use the TOC and go to slide 285)), I wanted to make sure that OO.org could deal with multi-column primary keys.  I ran the following through psql (yea, I could be using the designer at this point, but old habits…):

        create table a.test (name varchar(25), data text);

        alter table a.test add primary key (name,data);

I closed the odb file, re-opened it and sure enough,

it’s editable.  Great!  I’m connected

Hopefully the above is enough to get you started on your own chase.  Consider the above part I, I’ll eventually get around to a part II where I’ll talk about my forms and how I use them.  Happy context switching!

Well, a month later, I got an email asking if I could teach a database course this summer; that was much more involvement than I anticipated. I thought about it for a week, asked a few people for advice, and decided to accept. I filled out the paperwork a few days ago so now I am officially a Drexel adjunct professor, at least for the summer. I have already created a web site for the class. (Much of that material was provided by the previous instructor.)

The class is a combined graduate/undergraduate class, with both traditional and online students. Classes start June 22 and last for ten weeks. Students will use Postgres exclusively for learning SQL, homework, and projects. I hope this class not only encourages more Postgres use at Drexel and among Drexel graduates, but also spurs other educational institutions to explore the benefits of incorporating Postgres into their curriculum.