Find out 📣 who is speaking 📣 at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024.
Square's Ryan Lowe, production engineer, and John Cesario, platform engineer, spoke to us recently about PGConf Silicon Valley which is November 17-18 at the South San Francisco Conference Center.
Square creates technology that helps sellers of all sizes unlock the value of every sale. Square's register service is a full point-of-sale with tools for every part of running a business, from accepting credit cards and tracking inventory, to real-time analytics and invoicing.
Ryan and John will co-present a session titled "Postgres for MySQL DBAs." I talked with them recently about their session and the conference.
Terry: Ryan, please tell us a bit about the professional journey you've traveled to get where you are today at Square.
Ryan: I started off as a MS SQL Server DBA in the healthcare space before moving on to manage Oracle databases at a telco. It was there that I was first tasked with running PostgreSQL (6.5) as a backend to our VoIP suite. Since then, I bounced around industries managing primarily Postgres and/or MySQL before finding my way to Square, where I manage both as part of the Platform Engineering team.
Terry: John, the same question to you. Please tell us a bit about your background.
John: I started working in tech with Drupal hosted solution providers, where I got my first experiences with databases. I then moved on to larger hosting providers and helped to manage the database platform. Now, I'm part of the Online Data Storage team supporting multiple database platforms at Square.
Terry: Ryan, John, your session is titled, appropriately enough, "Postgres for MySQL DBAs." Why should a MySQL DBA attend this talk?
Ryan: Postgres can seem very unfamiliar to people who have used MySQL for many years. Although the general RDBMS concepts remain largely similar, implementation and terminology differences tend to cause steeper learning curves than necessary.
John: MySQL DBAs who intend to explore PostgreSQL as an alternative, or who are only casually administering it now, will avoid a lot of frustration as part of the technology ramp-up process.
Terry: What are the advantages of Postgres versus MySQL? And are there situations where one would be preferred over the other?
Ryan: Postgres offers many features that make it a feature-filled development platform. As both database systems continue to release new features, their relative competitive advantages seem to be converging.
Terry: What do you want the MySQL DBAs attending your presentation to walk away with?
Ryan: It is our hope that attendees will be able to directly map their MySQL knowledge, skills, and experiences to Postgres. They will walk away having a deeper knowledge of the shared (and not shared) terminology, features, processes, and philosophies of the two projects.
Terry: What other sessions/talks are you both interested in attending at the conference?
John: While we'd both love to be able to attend all of the talks at this year's conference, if we had to narrow it down to our top three picks, they would be:
- PostgreSQL Internals Through Pictures
- What's New in PostgreSQL 9.5
- Automating PostgreSQL Failover for High Availability
Terry: Thanks very much! Is there anything that I've missed you'd like to add?
Ryan: It has been exciting to watch the excitement and adoption of Postgres over the last several years, especially as competing database systems motivate each other to provide better features at an increasingly rapid rate. We look forward to watching the landscape continue to mature and evolve over the next several years.
Terry: Thank you for speaking with us, Ryan and John.
Register for PGConf Silicon Valley by October 18, 2015 and enjoy Early Bird Rates. Use discount code CitusData20 for an additional 20% savings off the current prices. We hope to see you at PGConf SV!
