PGConf Silicon Valley 2015

I have attended lots of PostgreSQL meetups and conferences, but never spoke at one. I always wanted to, but never had time or the opportunity. So I am very excited to be speaking at PGConf SV on November 18th 2015.

I plan to talk about using Ansible and PostgreSQL. We all have our favorite SQL database technologies, and for me, PostgreSQL is right at the top of this list. It has been somewhat quietly doing what a good database should; Smartly, safely, adding features and fixing bugs while powering a massive list of important workloads at an ever increasing list of interesting companies.

What is particularly exciting for me is this talk combines PostgreSQL with Ansible. Ansible has stormed the stage in the last few years as a fantastic automation framework. It quickly caught my attention because it’s all python (my fav). I became enamored quickly. My talk is aimed at helping folks with some intermediate and advanced configuration/management of the PostgreSQL RDBMS using Ansible. What a dream topic!

But why is Ansible + PostgreSQL interesting?

Ansible gets interesting when one considers just about any company from the grass-roots startup to the giant enterprise have multiple databses powering them. Multiple databases means a management problem. Automation is the key to easing these problems. An automation framework like Ansible becomes essential to:

• Standardization of change control
• Ability to run/re-run change from dev through to production
• Automate routine tasks
• Upgrades w/o drama
• Minimizing out-tage windows
• Management of vast arrays of databases as a singleton.
• Document processes between teams, shifts, or individuals.

And about 100 other reasons. Many DBA and Devops teams have bespoke processes and code for these things, and thats great. Ansible takes these to the next level, wrapping everything in a simple yet very powerful framework. I dive deep into these topics in my talk, I hope to see you there!

In addition, I think there will be some absolutely amazing talks being given. Here are some of the talks I am excited to attend, but you can be sure all of them are going to be excellent:

• Derek Nelson’s talk on PipelineDB.
• Bruce Momjian’s talk on using PG as the center of your ‘Dataverse’
• Jason Peterson speaking about pg_shard.

Also, I suspect Josh Berkus’s tutorial for folks who have inhereted a PostgreSQL database will be outstanding.

If you haven’t signed up already, go here and get it done! See you there.