LCA2010: Postgres represent!
By Selena Deckelmann
February 4, 2010
I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at LinuxConf.AU this year in Wellington, NZ. Linux Conf.AU is an institution whose friendliness and focus on the practical business of creating and sustaining open source projects was truly inspirational.
My talk this year was “A Survey of Open Source Databases”, where I actually created a survey and asked over 35 open source database projects to respond. I have received about 15 responses so far, and also did my own research on the over 50 projects I identified. I created a place-holder site for my research at: ossdbsurvey.org. I’m hoping to revise the survey (make it shorter!!) and get more projects to provide information.
Ultimately, I’d like the site to be a central location for finding information and comparing different projects. Performance of each is a huge issue, and there are a lot of individuals constructing good (and bad) systems for comparing. I don’t think I want to dive into that pool, yet. But I would like to start collecting the work others have done in a central place. Right now it is really far too difficult to find all of this information.
Part of the talk was also a foray into the dangerous world of classification. I tried to put together basic categories, based on conversations with individual developers and some fine-tuning with Josh Berkus. Josh gave a short overview of database models during “Relational vs Non-relational” in the Data Storage mini-conf, and we collaborated some on category definition. I also saw Devdas Bhagat give a use case talk on using Postgres, yet again confirming how wonderful transactional DDL is for developers. I also gave a lightning talk (WITHOUT SLIDES!) on Bucardo at the tail end of the Data Storage mini-conf.
Josh Berkus, during “PostgreSQL Development Today”, announced to the world that the new version of Postgres would be version 9.0! And he did a live demonstration of streaming replication and hot standby. The audience seemed pleased.
I was delighted to see representatives from the Postgres community on the main stage of the conference three times during LCA!
And finally, I had the pleasure of participating in the Friday keynote lightning talks. I kicked things off by telling the story of the elections in Ondo State, Nigeria, in 5 minutes. I saw that one of the IT people I met while in Akure was now helping Osun state investigate and correct election fraud in January. So glad to see that their good work continues!
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