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, and 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

It's now going to be PGCON 2013, then the French PostgreSQL Day in Nantes in June, that I don't have a link for yet. After that, OSCON in Portland, Oregon, Then the next PostgreSQL Europe Conference for which dates and location are being organized. Then I think I'll try to be there at Postgres Open in Chicago in September. Maybe some more, but that will be a surprise!

Emacs Conference

See also my article about the conference here: Emacs Conference.

El-Get

How to install Emacs Lisp Extensions the easy way!

Dalibo Sessions #5

See also my blog article The Need For Speed.

The Need For Speed

Afin d'obtenir de meilleurs performances avec PostgreSQL, dans la plupart des cas, l'approche la plus efficace consiste à revoir la manière dont le SQL est écrit. Et pour écrire un SQL plus rapide, souvent, la meilleure approche consiste à revoir le schéma de données…

Cette présentation donne quelques trucs et astuces afin d'obtenir de meilleures performances, mais pas à n'importe quel prix !

FOSDEM 2013, Brussels

See also my blog article Another great FOSDEM.

Event Triggers

PostgreSQL already did have Triggers, targeting Data Modification. Now in 9.3 it's proposing Triggers on Events. What events? What do you mean? What can such a trigger do, based on what information?

All you ever wanted to know about that new PostgreSQL feature, how it works and how to use it.

Implementing High Availability

How to implement PostgreSQL in a demanding project, what are the different technical offerings good for? All you wanted to know about replication and never dared to ask.

PostgreSQL includes several High Availability solution, some replication solutions, and some external Open Source projects complement the offering. When to use which project and what for? This talk will present the usual needs you want to address in a medium size project and how to use several replication solutions to implement them.

Présentation de PostgreSQL avec l'AFUP, Lyon

That conference is an all french conference, so the details about the talk and the talk slides itself are in french. If that's not a language you grok, sorry for the inconvenience!

Pour beaucoup de développeurs le SQL se limite au travail d’un ORM ou bien à ces chaînes de caractères qu’il faut embarquer dans le code, de manière plus ou moins statiques, et dont on aimerait bien se passer…

Nous allons voir en quelques exemples pratique comment faire SQL votre meilleur outil dès que vous avez besoin d’analyser des données.

PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2012, Prague

Implementing High Availability

How to implement PostgreSQL in a demanding project, what are the different technical offerings good for? All you wanted to know about replication and never dared to ask.

PostgreSQL includes several High Availability solution, some replication solutions, and some external Open Source projects complement the offering. When to use which project and what for? This talk will present the usual needs you want to address in a medium size project and how to use several replication solutions to implement them.

PGQ Cooperative Consumers

I had the pleasure to share the stage with Marko Kreen to copresent PGQ Cooperative Consumers in the Ligthning Talk session.

Large Scale MySQL Migration to PostgreSQL

The same one as in Chicago and Ottawa before that, please refer to those.

Postgres Open 2012, Chicago, USA

Large Scale MySQL Migration to PostgreSQL

Once a Top-10 internet audience site. 32 million users. Billions of photos and comments, more than 6TB of them. Migrating away from MySQL to PostgreSQL!

This talk will share hindsights about the why and the how of that migration, what problems couldn't be solved without moving away and how the solution now looks. The tools used for migrating away the data, the methods and will detail the new architecture. And the new home, in the cloud!

On the technical side of things, we will be talking about MySQL, mysqltocsv, pgloader, pljava, Google Protocol Buffers, pgbouncer, plproxy, PostgreSQL, pghashlib, walmgr, streaming replication. And Amazon hosting facilities too (EBS for starters).

PGDay 2012, Lyon, France

That conference is an all french conference, so the details about the talk and the talk slides itself are in french. If that's not a language you grok, sorry for the inconvenience!

Disponibilité et Durabilité : Architectures et Réplications

PostgreSQL et ses projects satellites permettent de mettre en oeuvre avec simplicité plusieurs types de réplications assez différentes. Nous verrons ici en quoi ces différentes solutions sont complémentaires en illustrant les besoins communs d'un projet d'architecture de taille moyenne : durabilité des données, plans de reprise et de continuité d'activité, procédures de reprise sur incident (erreurs et omissions), etc.

Nous détaillerons comment conjuguer plusieurs techniques afin de répondre au mieux à ces besoins : Streaming Réplication, Hot Standby, walmgr.py, Londiste, Démons PGQ, plproxy.

PGCON 2012, Ottawa

See my Back From PgCon blog article about the conference, you can grab the slides at the official conference website.

Large Scale MySQL Migration, to PostgreSQL

Once a Top-10 internet audience site. 32 million users. Billions of photos and comments, more than 6TB of them. Migrating away from MySQL to PostgreSQL!

This talk will share hindsights about the why and the how of that migration, what problems couldn't be solved without moving away and how the solution now looks. The tools used for migrating away the data, the methods and will detail the new architecture. And the new home, in the cloud!

On the technical side of things, we will be talking about MySQL, mysqltocsv, pgloader, pljava, Google Protocol Buffers, pgbouncer, plproxy, PostgreSQL, pghashlib, walmgr, streaming replication. And Amazon hosting facilities too (EBS for starters).

PGDAY 2011, Amsterdam, Netherlands

See my Back From Amsterdam blog article about the conference. Most of this conference slide decks are available at the PostgreSQL Conference Europe Talks 2011 wiki page.

Extensions are good for business logic.

PostgreSQL 9.1 features extensibility to the next level. While this often is a concern for C-developers among us, this talk will detail why extensions are a first-class facility for anyone doing Stored Procedures, whatever their implementation language.

If you ever did type CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION, be it in LANGUAGE SQL, then you're in!

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.