Unterwegs

Was the first time that I actually had the chance to attend CHAR(11). For various reasons (speak: my wife had tickets for a musical) I could not attend last year.

After arriving in Cambridge and a decent dinner on Sunday, I went early to the venue on Monday (*wow*). Registration: check, breakfast: check, EMC booth: check, tea: check - maybe not in this particular order. Let's start the day.

Most of the talks were very interesting and it's good to see, how others attempt to solve the same problems we have in Greenplum. Because of many questions, Simon organized a podium discussion with Yeb Havinga, Willem Dijkstra (both MGRID), Koichi Suzuki (Postgres-XC) and Rob Klopp (Greenplum) just before lunch. It's also interesting that people would like to see some of the technology in PostgreSQL - we have to talk with our product management, if we can make this happen.

Monday ended in a very good dinner in a near college, it looked a bit like the big hall in Harry Potter - just the candles were missing ;-) Tuesday ended in a barbeque outside the venue. Both gave the chance for the usual conversations which I enjoyed a lot.

Hopefully I can attend again next year.

CHAR(11), the conference about Clustering, High Availability and Replication takes place in Cambridge, UK. As usual, it is also one of these conferences where you can meet a fair share of the PostgreSQL folks.

Had to rent a car, because I have another appointment right after the conference. Boy, I tell you: driving on the left side of the street is ok. At least that's what I usually do on German motorways. But having the wheel of the right side of the car is just insane. Anyway, I made my way to Cambridge - without any accidents.

Met Dave, Harald, Jan and Magnus at the venue and a beer later we went out for dinner. Dave and Magnus made a reservation in the Browns restaurant only some minutes away. Some more people joined us over the evening. The food was nice, and Dave actually tried to order better drinks than I did. Well, he tried ;-)

Looks like we will see another interesting database conference.

Another day in Ottawa. Parts of the crowd attended the PL Developer Summit. Another part ventured the city. Personally I took the chance and got some sleep - only woken up by the room service, calling me and asking me when they can cleanup my room. H***, what is the reason of the "Do not disturb" sign on my door?

In the afternoon I went with Devrim to yesterday's place and we found most of the folks there. I'm not sure if they went again to the pub, or stayed all night ;-)

After a long search for a dinner restaurant, we finally decided to follow Greg oh je and ended up in the Hard Rock Cafe - this was actually Devrim's recommendation. We should really stop following Greg!

The dinner was decent, and guess where we went next? Right: the Royal Oak ;-)

During some drinks we found out, that we still have one or two months without PostgreSQL conferences. But I already heard Selena muttering about a "Query Planner Summit". This will be an interesting summer!

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum

Second - and last day - of PGCon 2011 is over. It was a very good conference, I got new ideas and learned a lot.

My conference day started with Jeff Davis' talk about "Range Types". This is imho a very useful new feature.

Had to skip the second slot because of some work and several phone conferences.

Afternoon started with Tom Lane's "Hacking the Query Planner - Part II". This was the continuation of yesterday's talk.

Greg Smith presented some insights of performance tuning under heavy load in his "The Write Stuff" talk. Very interesting. I finally have to buy his book.

The last was given by Dan Ports and Kevin Grittner about the new "Serializable Snapshot Isolation in Postgres". At first sight it sounds strange, but after a second thought it makes sense. It also includes some very advanced research stuff ;-)

PGCon ended with the "Closing sessions". Dan auctioned off some cool items, like several books, shirts, one of our plush elephants and posters. This collected 1705 Canadian Dollar and will be spent to a charity organization. Congratulations!

In the evening we went for a little party, sponsored by PGExperts. I also brought myself a cup of ice cream. This is a good day ;-)

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum

PGCon started today with a bunch of interesting talks. The weather in the morning was unsurprisingly bad, it was heavily raining. Also there was an announcement about a new PostgreSQL Conference (Postgres Open Conference), taking place in September in Chicago.

Paul Ramsey gave the keynote and talked about PostGIS. It's quite clear, why PostGIS is one of the "most pushing" extensions, in terms of new features in PostgreSQL.

The next talk on my list was Robert Treat, talking about "Database Scalability Patterns: Sharding for Unlimited Growth". Honestly, I found this talk not very interesting, because Robert was just talking about his view and his implementation of sharding, whereas the talk description spoke about a more general overview.

After that I moved to Gurjeet Singt and his talk about "Best practices with Ora2Pg". This talk was quite interesting and gave a broad overview about the existing problems and how Ora2PG is (trying to) solve them.

Selena Marie spoke next about "Maintaining Terabytes" and earned 8 beer later the day for the big number of tables in here database ;-)

I skipped the next talk and went to a nearby copy shop and printed a bunch of PGConf.EU flyers. We spread them all over the place and hopefully now everyone knows about our major conference in Amsterdam later this year.

Tom Lane is desperately looking for new query planner hackers and explained the different planner steps in detail. Looks like he has to continue his talk tomorrow, because there are too many details involved ;-)

Last talk(s) for today where the Lightning Talks. Jan Wieck and myself submitted a talk about our two IRC bots and explained shortly the upcoming new versions and included features. There were some more Lightning Talks, some very serious, and some very funny. Bruce earned 9 beers for making people using pg_upgrade ;-)

After the official part, it was time for the social event. Sponsored by EnterpriseDB, we met in a restaurant about 10 minutes away from the venue. Because of the warm dinner food it was quite hot in the room, but luckily there were free drinks for everyone. I also went to the nearby ice cream shop to make this a perfect day. During the evening I had the chance to talk with many people and had a fair amount of interesting discussions.

Waiting for the second day of the conference.

Postgre NoSQL - that's what Devrim was talking about in the Royal Oak pub. But more about his big failure later.

Yesterday in the evening I finally arrived in Ottawa. After some years trying to go to PGCon and somehow managed every year to be fully booked during the conference time. So it's my first PGCon, but hopefully not the last one. Obviously there are like a dozen "Royal Oak" pubs in the city, but after some rough directions from David Fetter ("it's the nearest one") I finally found the PostgreSQL crowd and got some breakfast.

Today started with some shopping and lunch together with Stefan - mastermind - Kaltenbrunner and Thom - dark_ixion - Brown. Afternoon we "checked in" for the conference, again in the Royal Oak pub ;-) and again we met more PostgreSQL folks. Dinner was with EnterpriseDB, thanks for the invitation!

Finally after dinner we headed back to ... the Royal Oak, where else? ;-)

Somehow we managed to loose most of the EDB folks on the way to the pub, but Tom Lane and Robert Haas joined us later. That's where Devrim, after some beer, talked himself into an early Postgre grave ;-)

Good night, see you tomorrow at the conference (finally a conference which I can attend without being involved into the planning ;-) )

Der Eisenbahn-Club Schönebeck (Elbe) e.V. hat seine Modellbahnanlage in der Liebknechtschule aufgebaut. Die komplette Aula ist von einer großen Anlage belegt, zusätzlich ist auf der Bühne eine größere Anlage für die Kinder aufgebaut. Außer den Modellbahnen selbst erhält man Informationen zur Geschichte der Eisenbahn in der Gegend.

Leider ist die Ausstellung nur noch am Sonntag dem 13. Februar zu besichtigen. Wir haben die Gelegenheit genutzt und mit unserem Eisenbahnbegeisterten Kind einen Ausflug dorthin gemacht. Ein schwerer Fehler - haben wir doch arge Probleme gehabt, das Kind dort wieder wegzubekommen ;-)

Wir hatten ja mit dem Navigon schon viel Spaß (siehe hier und hier). Nun sind während des heißen Sommers im Fuß der Fahrzeughalterungen sämtliche Befestigungen für die dort eingebaute Feder gebrochen - das Plastik sah geschmolzen und porös aus. Nun denn, Kaufbeleg herausgesucht und ins Geschäft. Bei der Gelegenheit wurde das gesamte Gerät eingeschickt und die bereits bekannten Probleme wurden reklamiert.

Ergebnis: die Fahrzeughalterung wurde getauscht. Das Gerät wurde auf Werkseinstellungen zurückgesetzt. Mehr wurde nicht getan. Nicht mal eine aktuelle Softwareversion aufgespielt. Als Konsequenz waren natürlich auch sämtliche aktualisierten Karten gelöscht - da die "Probezeit" jedoch vorbei ist, dürfen wir jetzt die Aktualisierungen für die Karten kaufen. Vielen Dank Navigon, das ist echter Service.

Eine aktuelle Software ist mittlerweile wieder installiert. Der Spaß kann weitergehen:

Wenn man nun an einer Autobahnausfahrt oder an einem Autobahnkreuz vorbeifährt, bei dem die Ausfahrt am Ende wieder auf die Autobahn führt, möchte das Gerät einen neuerdings unbedingt über die Ausfahrt schicken. Keine Ahnung, welcher Programmierer sich so etwas ausgedacht hat - auf jeden Fall ist der Umweg über die Ausfahrt langsamer als über die Autobahn. Beim ersten Mal war es noch lustig, ab dem vierten oder fünften Mal ist das nur noch störend.

Wird wohl mal langsam Zeit für ein anderes Gerät.

Im Süden des Rotehornparks mitten in Magdeburg befindet sich ein schönes, ruhig gelegenes Ausflugsziel: die Salzquelle.

Salzquelle im Rotehornpark in Magdeburg

Dass es die Magdeburger Verkehrsbetriebe mit dem Geschehen in der Stadt nicht so genau nehmen, dürfte hinlänglich bekannt sein. Egal ob da viel oder wenig los ist, es fahren immer die gleichen Verbindungen. So geschehen auch heute vormittag: es ist Samstag, aber es ist Feiertag. Demzufolge fahren die Straßenbahnen wie Sonntag. Nachdem dann Ewigkeiten später endlich mal eine Straßenbahn kommt, ist diese natürlich total überfüllt und es ist kein Platz für einen weiteren Kinderwagen. Das Schubsen und Drängeln geht also los.

So richtig schief gelaufen mit dem Fahrplan ist das jedoch beim Insa (das ist das Informationssystem Nahverkehr Sachsen-Anhalt) oder der Übermittlung der Fahrplandaten von der MVB zur Insa. Dort war man doch am 1. Mai glatt der Meinung, das wäre ein normaler Samstag und demzufolge würden alle regulären Straßenbahnen fahren. Dabei hatte ich gestern abend extra noch auf der Webseite nach einer passenden Straßenbahn geschaut, das theoretische Ergebnis sieht so aus:

Verbindungsübersicht für Samstag, den 1. Mai 2010 - ein Feiertag.

Von den in der Verbindungsübersicht angezeigten Straßenbahnen fuhr genau eine - dementsprechend voll war die Bahn. Und die Stadt wundert sich, warum die Bürger auf das Auto ausweichen ...