ads' corner

As Josh Berkus blogged before, Pivotal is hosting the inaugural South Bay PostgreSQL Meetup in the Palo Alto office.

We were able to secure two very good speaker:

• Mason Sharp, from TransLattice: Scale-out PostgreSQL with PostgreSQL-XL
• Peter van Hardenberg, from Heroku: Postgres 9.4, new opportunities for users, admins and hackers

Please sign up at the Meetup website, if you plan to attend.

Date: Monday, February 16th, 2015

Time: 6:30pm

Location: 3495 Deer Creek Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 United States

Beginning of February 2014 I moved back from goPivotal to EMC.

Last year, VMware and EMC (USA) fostered a new company: gPivotal - everything cloud and agile. Among other resources, they also moved Greenplum over into this new startup. This happened in Germany during May/June. However, as some of you may know, I was not very happy with this move and end of last year I finally decided to leave goPivotal.

After submitting my resignation and publicly announcing that I'm looking for something new, I was contacted by a number companies, including EMC (Germany).

Turns out that the companies which upfront expressed the greatest interest are not really interested. And companies which you think they don't have what you are looking for - well, they turn around and offer you something even more interesting.

In the end, after considering various offers, I decided to move to the Digital Applications Work Group in EMC.

Recently I was asked how I do backups of my mobile devices. The discussion started when I told that I "survived" a bricked device without data loss.

Disclaimer: I work (well, was working, before we got spinned of into a subsidiary) for EMC. Part of EMCs portfolio is "backup" and for sure I learned a lot from my employer. All my own devices and servers are backed up, some of them multiple times. Backups, devices and communication is encrypted. I'm not using public services (Dropbox, Drive, ...) for the backups.

So, what happened? One Friday afternoon, my Samsung S3 bricked itself. It was connected to the charger on my desk, the display flashed for a moment and then the device was dead. Reset, reboot, remove battery - nothing helped. No access to the data on the device.