Hop Aboard The PgPy Train

Are you going to both NYC PgConf and PyCon? Join me and hopefully other PostgreSQL geeks aboard the Adirondack Train on April 7th to Montreal.  We'll travel to Montreal, sight see for a couple days, and then attend PyCon! The train has wifi, coffee, snacks, and drinks, and rolls past the beautiful Hudson River Valley.

I'm thinking we take over the lounge for a 9.4 beta-testing hack session. Or just hang out and talk FDWs and high availability.

Contact me at josh@postgresql.org for more information, or just buy your April 7th tickets on the Adirondack Train!  Tickets are just $67.

pgCon Submissions: give us a description!

So I'm about 2/3 of the way through evaluating the pgCon submissions so that we can choose talks.  The good thing is that we have an amazing bunch of interesting talks, including genomics, e-government, big data, security, extensions, administration, and of course 9.4 stuff.  The bad thing is that a lot of speakers this year submitted one-sentence proposals, so they are getting rejected.  And that's sad, since those speakers probably have awesome stuff to present, but if we don't have a description, how can we tell?

In several cases, I get the impression that because the speakers are well-known community members, they expect us to trust them that they have a good topic.  The problem with that reasoning is that we're not going to bump a new speaker with an interesting topic and a well-prepared talk outline against an old hand with a proposal which reads "something cool here".  This year, there's 97 proposals for 32 slots, so we're going to take the best of the best.

So ... if you submitted a one-sentence talk proposal: there's still 3 days of voting left.  Update the proposal ASAP, and let us know you've done so!  (pgcon-committee@lists.pgcon.org)

Replication Auto-Failover at SFPUG coming up

One of the things we've been lacking in Postgres world for a while is a utility which can smoothly handle auto-failover in a replicated cluster, and integrates with the users' other high availability server management tools.  That is, while our built-in replication handles failover and supports all the configurations you could want, it's been left up to the user to implement their own failover management tools.  Well, I've taken a crack at changing this situation: introducing HandyRep.

Now, HandyRep is still somewhat of a work in progress (consider it a version 0.8), but I'll be talking about it Tuesday at SFPUG.  We'll have live video of the presentation and demo, starting at around 7:15pm PST.

The goals of the HandyRep project are:

• Supports configurable automated failover logic for high availability
• Supports manual failover, replication monitoring, node provisioning, and remastering (with 9.3).
• Written entirely in Python, for easy hackability
• All functionality is accessible as an embeddable Python library.
• All functionality accessible via a REST interface when using the included Flask application with a web server.
• Supports user-supplied plugins to let it interface with applications in your environment.
• Can be run from a 3rd-party server (such as a pgbouncer server)
• Designed to minimize the per-node installation/configuration requirements. No "agent" is installed on the nodes.
• Highly configurable to support  whatever the user's PostgreSQL configuration and file arrangement is on each node.
• Supports multiple replicas and remastering (requires 9.3)
• Integrates 3rd-party connection failover, such as pgbouncer, HAProxy, or BigIP.
• Integrates with configuration management utilities, such as Puppet, Chef, CFEngine and SaltStack.
• Integrates with archiving utilities such as WAL-E and Barman
• Licensed under the same terms as PostgreSQL itself.

Now, not all of these goals are satisfied yet -- there's still a lot of plugin-writing to do.  However, we've made a good start and expect to be deploying HandyRep in production before the end of the month.  Tune in to SFPUG to find out more!

Submit to pgCon!

Happy new year, everyone!  As of today, you only have two weeks left to submit a talk to pgCon, the PostgreSQL Developer Conference.  You know you want to dazzle other Postgres geeks with your database wizardry, so why don't you give it a try?  Submit now.