Countdown to pgCon
As you may be aware, pgCon 2010, the PostgreSQL conference, is just a few months away. It is an important year for pgCon with the upcoming release of PostgreSQL 9.0. pgCon's roots are in the PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit where hackers from all over the world flew in to celebrate PostgreSQL's 10 years of open-source. pgCon has kept with the tradition of catering to the core of the PostgreSQL community including hackers and DBA's alike.
As the largest PostgreSQL conference one can always expect to be exposed to new features, the latest in thoughts on PostgreSQL performance and scaling, not to mention the many talks aimed at all levels of PostgreSQL professionals and enthusiasts. To get ready for pgCon this year, I thought I might point out the talks not to miss.
One of the biggest talks will have to be Heikke Linnakangas introduction of the new built-in replication features in PostgreSQL, Hot Standby and Streaming Replication. If you're not familiar with these features, they are truly game changing for Postgres. Building on the conceptual foundation of Warm-Standby and Point and Time Recovery log shipping, Hot Standby and Streaming Replication turn idle Warm Standby boxes in to active read-only slaves. Married with a HA solution, Hot Standby becomes an immediate failover solution with the ability to disconnect from the Hot Standby master server and turn on writes. In an effort to speed up the whole log-shipping paradigm, the streaming replication feature means no more external commands for copying log segments across the wire to Warm Standby servers. By combing these two features, one of the most sought-after features for PostgreSQL, native replication, becomes a reality. Heikke brings to this talk an intimate knowledge of the implementation of these two new features making this talk a must-see.
If you haven't been to pgCon before and are a PostgreSQL user, DBA or enthusiast like myself, this is the year not to miss. As for the other significant talks for pgCon 2010, stay tuned as I will highlight my must-see list of talks in the coming weeks.
