dim's Conferences

I've now been presenting my development or activities at a bunch of Conferences, often enough that I though I would list them here.

Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BlankMap-World-2009.PNG

About me

You could read the whois Dimitri Fontaine page of this website, or even the 2ndQuadrant page that talks more about my PostgreSQL Expertise Consulting company, but here's what you might read on any PostgreSQL Conference I've been speaking to:

Dimitri Fontaine is part of the PostgreSQL community and has been contributing to Open Source for more than 10 years now. His recent work include adding explicit EXTENSION support to PostgreSQL.

Dimitri is the lead developer of enterprise ready solutions such as pgloader (ETL), PostgreSQL prefix indexing (telephony routing), pg_staging (dev environment maintenance from production backups), preprepare (allow easy usage of prepare statements behind a connection pooler), and some backports of recent PostgreSQL features (such as the UUID type or the suppress-redundant-update trigger).

He also contributed to Skytools and the Londiste replication system (both code and documentation), and authored a PHP layer for the PGQ event handler, allowing for robust asynchronous processing and code reuse.

Dimitri likes system design, finding the right compromise using existing solutions when they do exist, with reducing Mean Time Between Failures as a stated goal.

Professional experience, community involvement and PostgreSQL expertise have led Dimitri to now work as a principal consultant at 2ndQuadrant, France.

Next Conferences

PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2011 will be held on October 18-21 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, at the Casa 400 hotel. You can expect three days packed with presentations about PostgreSQL and related technologies, one day of extended trainings, and the usual hallway and social track!

CHAR 11, Cambridge, UK

See also my blog articles Prêt pour CHAR(11) ?, Back From CHAR(11) and De retour de CHAR(11).

Deploying Skytools 3.0

Skytools 3.0 has been recently released. Talk will cover What is Skytools?Why would you want to upgrade? Plus deployment experience, direct from the packager of this software project.

PGCON 2011, Ottawa

See also my blog articles Back from Ottawa, preparing for Cambridge.

Extensions development

both of the feature and developments using it

PostgreSQL extensibility is remarkable but incomplete. It lacks dump and restore support.

What that means is that once an extension is installed into your database, PostgreSQL currently has no idea of what SQL objects belongs to the extension rather itself, so the dump will contain the instructions to install the extension. That's only practical if you want to restore your dump targeting the very same extension's version, but when upgrading systems that's seldom what happens. This talk will detail how to fix this problem and more, explaining you how to benefit from the extensions capabilities for your own work within the database.

FOSDEM 2011, Brussels, Belgium

See also my blog articles Going to FOSDEM and Back from FOSDEM.

PostgreSQL extension's development

PostgreSQL extensibility is remarkable but incomplete. It lacks dump and restore support. What that means is that once an extension is installed into your database, PostgreSQL currently has no idea of what SQL objects belongs to the extension rather itself, so the dump will contain the instructions to install the extension. That's only practical if you want to restore your dump targeting the very same extension's version, but when upgrading systems that's seldom what happens. This talk will detail how to fix this problem and more, explaining you how to benefit from the extensions capabilities for your own work within the database.

PGDay 2010, Stuttgart, Germany

PostgreSQL Extension's development

Yes, once more, that was the Hot topic of the days.

PostgreSQL extensibility is remarkable but incomplete. It lacks dump and restore support. What that means is that once an extension is installed into your database, PostgreSQL currently has no idea of what SQL objects belongs to the extension rather itself, so the dump will contain the instructions to install the extension. That's only practical if you want to restore your dump targeting the very same extension's version, but when upgrading systems that's seldom what happens. This talk will detail how to fix this problem and more, explaining you how to benefit from the extensions capabilities for your own work within the database.

PGCON 2010, Ottawa

See also my blog article Back from PgCon2010.

2 years of Londiste

PostgreSQL usage at Hi-Media

Hi-Media online services all run atop PostgreSQL, and use some form of replication. This talk will present what problems we solve with replication, and how.

As we only use Skytools (Londiste) for replicating data, the talk will summarize what we've found in this project after having been using it for 2 years in production. From the community aspects to the failure experience and the impact on the database management (rollouts, etc).

pgstaging

That was a lightning talk.

PG Day 2009, Paris, France

You can see my talks at PGDay.eu 2009 here, and a copy is of course available. See also my blog article PGday.eu feedback.

Retour d'expérience : PostgreSQL et Skytools chez Hi-Media

Hi-Media appuie aujourd'hui l'essentiel de ses services sur des technologies libres, et en matière de bases de données, le choix de PostgreSQL s'accompagne des Skytools. Ces outils nous permettent de faire de la réplication de données dans des cadres très différents (fédération de données pour répartition de charge, réplication croisée pour séparation des composants, maintenance d'une solution de reprise sur incidents, traitements asynchrones métiers…).

pg_staging or how to manage your staging environments

Any live database has backups, right? Often both dumps and file system level backups (PITR, WAL archiving etc). pg_staging is about leveraging this duty in order to manage a fine development and testing environment, where developpers can easily test their code against recent live data, updated on-demand or automatically.

PGCon 2009, Ottawa

I did again the lightning talk about PGQ. See also my blog article about PgCon 2009.

PG Day 2008, Prato, Italy

You can find all the talks of this conference from the European PGDay 2008 page on the PostgreSQL wiki.

Note that the PGQ one is a lightning talk.