pgDaySF 2015 Takeaways

We recently attended pgDaySF, the one-day PostgreSQL event organized by the San Francisco PostgreSQL User Group and part of the bigger FOSS4G conference. The event was very well attended, and we were excited by the content of several presentations.

• Bruce Momjian offered a very interesting talk on the PostgreSQL planner. He summarized the three decisions a planner makes—scan method, join order, and join method—and then gave an example of each.
• During the Lightning Talks, David Haynes from the University of Minnesota discussed a project that involves collecting census, agriculture, and climate data from most governments in the world. To optimize compression, the team is putting the data into a PostgreSQL columnar store, which happens to be cstore_fdw.
• PostGIS committer Paul Ramsey, who works for CartoDB, delivered a very well-attended talk on basic and more advanced ways to use PostGIS/PostgreSQL to process spatial data, build infrastructures, and more.

We also gave a well-attended presentation on pg_shard: Shard and scale out PostgreSQL that generated a lot of interest. In our talk, we showed how the concept of logical sharding helps with dynamically scaling out a cluster. We also talked about how pg_shard leverages PostgreSQL's extension APIs to be fully compatible with the database. Finally, we showed a demo at the end of our talk of one of the largest European retailers that is using CitusDB to power their dashboards. This retailer has many delivery trucks sending GPS data, and the demo showed how they use CitusDB to visualize real-time heatmaps overlayed on a map of Europe. After the demo, we took questions from the audience, and noted that we've seen this heatmap easily scale to 35M vehicles in a similar use-case.

• conference talks
• cstore_fdw
• pg_shard

• conference talks
• cstore_fdw
• pg_shard