Seattle User Group Thoughts and Fall Opportunities

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ March 7, 2023 ⋅ Leave a comment

Filed Under autovacuum, corruption, database, new features, performance, PostgreSQL, seattle, user group, wait events

Last Thursday was the first in-person Seattle Postgres Users Group meetup since early 2020. We didn’t formally track attendee companies, but I recall having Apple, AWS, Fred Hutch, Google, Microsoft and OtterTune all represented. Besides the presentation about performance, we also had pizza and drinks and a book table. I happily loaned out my copy of Peter Neumann’s book “Computer-Related Risks” to someone who thought it sounded like an interesting and fun read. 🙂

While in-person activities were paused for a few years, Lloyd and I spent some time thinking about the goals and the future of this Seattle user group. We ran a member survey. We met up a couple times for working sessions on future plans. (We may have also sampled some meat and cheese from Lloyd’s smoker.)

We have a lot in the works.

I’m most excited for a possible collaboration with the computer science department of a local university – because it includes opportunities this fall for anyone who works with tech in the Seattle area.

We started last Thursday’s meetup with an announcement about those opportunities and with some thoughts about the user group in general. Here’s a recording (it’s less than 10 minutes):

Here’s a link to an online “interest sign-up form” for the fall 2023 meetup opportunities. It’s not a commitment; it just tells Lloyd and I that you’re interested so we can follow up when it’s closer to fall.

Please consider signing up!!

Looking Forward

I mentioned that Lloyd and I spent some time thinking about the goals and the future of the Seattle Postgres Users Group. Here are a few of the ideas that we’ve come up with.

On a side note, if anyone knows about interesting or innovative ideas that other user groups (of any flavor) have come up with, please share – I’d love to compare notes and swap ideas! Organizing user groups and keeping them running is hard work. Oh and make sure tell your local user group organizers that you appreciate the work they do!

Spring 2023

Technical Content: on the first Thursday of the month, at 6pm, we will meet at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center (Eastlake Building) for a technical presentation. We even have an out-of-town speaker visiting in May. There are a couple visitor parking spots in the garage downstairs, and street parking is free starting at 6pm.
- March 2 – Performance Tuning with Wait Events
- April 6 – Heavy Churn Workloads and Autovacuum
- May 4 – PostgreSQL New Features (out-of-town guest)
- June 8 – String Comparisons and Database Corruption (Tentative/Planned)
Social: on the third Thursday of the month, at 7pm, we will meet at Garage Billiards and Bowl on Capital Hill for “Best Practices and Billiards”. At some point in the evening there will be a brief (5 minute) discussion of one best practice aka Happiness Hint, but otherwise this time is unstructured and we will just hang out. Maybe play a few games of 8-ball on the pool tables. The dates are March 16, April 20, May 18 and June 22.
Book Table: Many people still like to flip through physical books, so we’ll have a table at every meetup with a selection for browsing – and in some cases for borrowing. There will be plenty of PostgreSQL books but also some general technology books as well. (I’ll probably bring a few Oracle books, and – just for fun – might bring my Kernighan/Ritchie C & AWK books as well as my Jim Gray benchmarking handbook with the history of the TPC.) If you have a book that you like – old or new – bring it along! I enjoy talking about good books!

Details are posted at https://www.meetup.com/seattle-postgres (BTW, that’s a little bit of my daughter’s artwork on the banner right now 🚀).

Summer 2023

We will kick off the summer on Thursday July 6 with our SEAPUG annual BBQ, then we’ll take a break until the fall.

Fall 2023

Right now, the goal is to run a fall series from October to December. The big news here is the possible collaboration with a local university – as discussed in the short video above.

If you work with tech in the greater Seattle area then please consider adding your name to our “interest sign-up form” – not a commitment but it tells us to follow up with you as the fall approaches.