Seattle Postgres User Group and PASS Summit – PGSQL Phriday #014

This month’s PGSQL Phriday #014 is about PostgreSQL Events, and it’s a great time to give an update about the Seattle Postgres User Group where I’ve been working together with long-time organizer Lloyd Albin. At the beginning of this year, I wrote about re-starting our meetups post-pandemic. This Thursday is our final meetup of 2023 (Jennifer Scheuerell is talking about migrations) and it’s been a great year! We’ve seen attendance steadily grow; our November 2 in-person meetup (Tommy Li about Database Binpacking) was around 20. There are first-timers visiting every month. We’ve talked this year about architecture, replication, churn and vacuum, performance, corruption, and more. We’ve had social events ranging from informal meetups to our big annual July summer BBQ.

I’m excited that our Seattle Postgres User Group Spring 2024 schedule is ready and looks amazing! The first 2024 meetup will be Thursday January 18 and Chelsea Dole will be giving her talk <It’s Not You, It’s Me: “Breaking Up” With Massive Tables via Partitioning>… besides that it’s a great topic and a knowledgeable presenter, I love the name she came up with. 😂 There’s a lot more amazing content coming in 2024 including Paul Ramsey and Joe Conway. Mark your calendars!

But the most ambitious thing that we tackled this year as a user group…

I first heard from Ryan Booz about a big database conference historically focused on SQL Server, which allegedly wanted to add a full PostgreSQL track. I’m talking about sessions, a coordinated “learning pathway” track, a panel discussion, a booth and even a community zone PostgreSQL AMA. The PASS Data Summit Team went ALL-OUT. I really enjoy traveling for conferences, but I’m limited right now for some family reasons. When I found out this conference was in Seattle, I was excited!

As a local user group we decided to staff the PostgreSQL community booth, and leading up to the conference Lloyd and I worked on recruiting local members to help. A huge shout-out to Rox, Deon, Eric and Chelsea (pictured here with Lloyd and I) for contributing by staffing the PostgreSQL booth or being a PostgreSQL session speaker!! One of my favorite parts of the conference was occasionally overhearing anecdotes and snippets from a conversation between user group volunteers and conference attendees – I’m awed by their decades of experience with PostgreSQL and businesses large & small.

I was unprepared for PASS. I had no idea how big this conference was. I expected to meet lots of people from Seattle. I did meet people from Washington, but it wasn’t skewed that way – I met people from all over the United States and even from overseas. We had a lot of traffic and conversations at the PostgreSQL community booth on topics like migration planning and where to hire/train, and tools for monitoring or backup/recovery. One person raved about PostGIS. Another doing lots of failover/failback testing & had technical questions. I haven’t seen any official numbers but I think my wait events talk was probably 20-30ish and my collation talk maybe 10ish (it was at the same time and competing with Rob’s very popular talk, but hey my feedback rating was great and I had exactly the right 10 people for this particular low-level talk because we had great discussion after I finished the slides).

I think a few things caused some extra PostgreSQL interest at the PASS summit. I heard that a PostgreSQL vector demo was in the kick-off keynote. Brent Ozar had just published a blog about what he called The Postgres Conversation™. And WiltonDB was just announced (Babelfish-based on-premises SQL Server drop-in replacement). 85 people entered our raffle for a couple Packt Postgres books, 69% of these identified as DBAs.

After the PASS Summit, I’m really excited that in-person conferences have returned in full force. I’m excited for the growing local Seattle Postgres User Group… and if I can’t do as much traveling as I’d like, then I’m going to work with Lloyd and bring some great speakers here to Seattle! 😀

We did not manage to get photos of all the PostgreSQL speakers and community members who contributed to this conference, but I wanted to collect and post some of the photos that I did find. I didn’t take most of these and I spent pretty much all my time at the PostgreSQL community booth. But they’re great pictures! I think these were mostly taken by Claire, Pavlo, Ryan and Deon. (Hope I didn’t forget anyone!)

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