I’m back home from Brussels. Tired, but content. It was such a pleasure meeting all the PostgreSQL people. I did miss the key-signing party though, which is a bit of a pity. I was called in to moderate the talks in the main room, where a track on building systems was scheduled. I feared it would be a bit boring, but the contrary turned out to be the case: the talk on SCons was enlightening. I might actually consider using it on a next project, even though it has a python dependency. Python is becoming standard more and more anyway.

On the PostgreSQL front, i went to a talk by Gabriele Bartolini, one of the driving forces of the italian PostgreSQL users groep. At the back of my mind, the idea of a Dutch PostgreSQL user group has been gestating. I’ve met two other PostgreSQL-ites from Holland during fosdem, and there are probably more. Who knows, I might just try and get them together, and see where things go from there. Gabriele is an inspiring person, whose enthousiasm about PostgreSQL advocacy sparked something in me.

At the end of the day, we elected the first board of the Postgresql EU association! The unofficial results: Magnus Hagander, Gabriele Bartolini, Jean-Paul Argudo and Andreas Scherbaum are the members of this historic board. Originally, only 3 members would be elected, but there was a tie for the third position so it was decided that we would just have four! Congratulations to all. They will now shape the association, no doubt with help from others such as me.

I’m gonna keep this a short post. I’m tired, and have to get up early tomorrow again. Fosdem crew, thanks! PostgreSQL people, thanks! I had a great weekend!

David Fetter

Quite a succesfull day for PostgreSQL af fosdem I would say: the goodies sold like mad, and the devroom (shared with FreeBSD) was packed! Between doing some volunteering for the fosdem organisation, finding people i know who also are visting fosdem, walking along the booths and visiting some other talks (a.o. the openasf ligthning talk) I unfortunately only saw two of the talks in the shared dev room. I even missed out on the FreeBSD talks, which is a shame, because I really dig FreeBSD!

At least I was present for the PostgreSQl keynote, which was brought by David Fetter. He talked about all the great new features the recently released PostgreSQL 8.3 has. In his talk, David alluded to some of the things Simon Riggs would later elaborate on in his talk titled ‘PostgreSQL 8.3 performance features’.

In case you missed it, there are quite some performance improvements in 8.3. One of those is HOT (heap-only tuples), which is sort of a mini-vacuum which kicks in as soon as a page has filled up. Another is asynchronous transactions, where you can say that for certain transactions, writing it to the WAL log can be delayed.

Simon Riggs

Another great feature is the simultaneous sequential scan. One of the more expensive operations on larger tables is the sequential scan, where each record is loaded from disk one-by-one. When two queries have to scan the same table, a lot of disk-i/o is duplicated. With the simultaneous scanning, the second query will piggy-back on the scan that is already going on.

I haven’t put 8.3 in production yet, but having heard Simon present some of the performance features, i’m more likely to switch soon. Especially because 8.3 has better options to diagnose performance problems, which i’m eager to check out.

Mind you, these performance improvements are no silver bullets. For most of them, you need to be aware of the limits and conditions of each of them. And most importantly, these features have been designed with certain use cases in mind. What is needed is more exhaustive testing, more analysis of how things work in cases that might not have been thought of by the developers.

Tonight is the free beer party at imatix, by former FFII president Pieter Hintjens. I was planning on going there, but we only finished dinner around 23:00, and i’m way too tired to drink belgian beers. It is a pity, i was looking forward to meeting Pieter and other FFII people.

Other highlights of the day were finally meeting a TWiki friend of mine, saying hi to Reinout of the wg open source of GroenLinks and buying a syllable deluxe cd. Tomorrow will be the key-signing party, the election of the first board of the PostgreSQL eu association and of course the auction of one of the two big plush elephants!

It was a bit early getting out of bed, but worth it. The PostgreSQL booth is up, i’ve put myself in a PostgreSQL shirt and the live cd’s are labeled. What can go wrong now? I’m gonna see what else there is to do here!

Zo, ik ben weer eens in Brussel, in het PostgreSQL hotel. Ik ben hier voor fosdem, de jaarlijkse europese open source ontwikkelaars conferentie. Het is al best laat, ik kom net terug van het alternatieve beer event. Het is maar goed dat de PostgreSQL groep een alternatief voor het officiele bier event heeft gezocht, want voorlopige rapporten wijzen uit dat het weer veel en veel te druk is geweest aldaar.

Wij zaten met een man of 20-30 in het bier circus, waar ze ontzettend veel bier op voorraad hebben (en bij elk bier het juiste glas). Tien tot 15 pagina’s telt het biermenu. Een hapje eten kan ook, ik had biefstuk met Duvel saus, lekker hoor! Duvel is sowieso mijn favoriete bier, hoewel niet de meest ‘exotische’ keuze van de kaart.

Later voegden ook enkele FreeBSD’ers zich bij ons. PostgreSQL en FreeBSD delen samen een developers room, eigenlijk heel erg logisch: PostgreSQL en FreeBSD zijn een ontzettend goede combinatie, zowel technisch als sociaal.

Lopend vanaf het biercircus, want de laatste tram en metro waren reeds vertrokken, trokken we de camera niet bij alle mooie gebouwen die we passeerden. Maar toen we onderstaande busje tegenkwamen, werd er druk geflitst! Samen met Gevik, de andere Nederlandse PostgreSQL enthousiasteling, posseerden we voor het busje. Die foto houden jullie nog te goed (want die staat niet op mijn camera).

Woei, een nieuwe simuze compilatie! Mindz music volume 1, in samenwerking met mindz.com. Ik heb hem zojuist gedownload (ik was de 8e of 9e, daar wil ik even van af zijn), dus zit ik nu (terwijl het buiten stormt en regent) te luisteren naar ‘Het is lente’ van ‘De toffen‘. De toffen zijn zondermeer een van de meer vermakelijke artiesten op simuze, met hun expliciete teksten en opzwepende ritmes.

De compilatie biedt weer een veelvoud aan stijlen, van rock tot techno, van jazz tot hiphop. En uiteraard allemaal onder creative commons uitgebracht! En voor wie ze nog niet had gedownload, de eerdere compilaties staan ook nog online.