PGSQL Phriday #001 Wrap-up and review!

As I sit here on October 7, 2022 watching PostgreSQL friends from all around the globe post contributions to the first ever PGSQL Phriday blogging event, I’m honestly pretty shocked… and very (very, very, very) grateful! While I have lots of ideas and love connecting with people to hear their stories, I wasn’t sure what to expect because, let’s face it, there are so many demands for our time and attention.

The fact that many folks have been supportive of this idea and contributed to this first event truly warms my heart. Thank you each for helping to get this ball rolling!

Recap: How good is the Postgres community at lying? 😉

Quick note to future hosts: You don’t have to give personal background on every contributor. That’s just how I think about these interactions. Feel free to just give a brief summary of the post!

Lætitia Avrot – Lætitia has been one of my go-to sources for learning psql better as I’ve grown in my PostgreSQL journey. (she has lots of other 💯 content and presentations too!). So, it comes as no surprise that for the inaugural PGSQL Phriday Lætitia would give us some nuggets about the beloved command-line tool, with a slight twist on the “two truths and a lie” twist. 😂 Specifically, I really appreciated her second tip that points to repeatability when collaborating with others.

Lutz Horn – One thing that I’ve grown to love with the PostgreSQL community is the diverse avenues of communication. Lutz submitted his post through the pgsql-general email list and I am so thankful he reached out! Lutz’s post talked about three features of PostgreSQL (ON CONFLICT...DP UPDATE, table inheritance, and CTE’s) that he uses often… or hopes to use more often… in his work with PostgreSQL.

Grant Fritchy – I’ve known Grant’s work and teaching for many years in the SQL Server world. It’s been fun to see him learn more about PostgreSQL and relate to his expertise with SQL Server, not that dissimilar to my (ongoing) journey these last 4+ years. Grant took the this opportunity to talk about backing up and restoring databases in PostgreSQL, including the introduction of a new PostgreSQL commands I’d never heard of… 😉

Andreas Scherbaum – Ads is well know to the PostgreSQL community and has been a consistent source of help and connection for me personally. He faithfully helps with multiple PostgreSQL conferences, teaches about multiple topics, and continues to post “PostgreSQL Person of the Week” interviews to help highlight members of the community. The first presentation I ever saw Andreas give was about PostgreSQL deployments with Ansible and so I was happy to see him provide some guidance on configuring dates, backups, and roles in PostgreSQL.

Andy Atkinson – I had the pleasure of meeting Andy at PGConf NYC 2021, in that magical time just after Thanksgiving and the third week of December 2021 when a few in-person conferences were able to meet before things shut down again for a month because of COVID spikes. He’s an active Ruby on Rails developer and speaker and so his post looks at three ways to improve a Rails application that utilizes PostgreSQL as the database. If you’re a Rails developer, you should bookmark Andy’s site and Twitter account to learn more about developing great PostgreSQL apps on Rails.

Pat Wright – More and more folks in the U.S. contingent of PostgreSQL users have seen Pat become more involved in the community and conferences as the world continues to open up again. He’s an avid conference organizer in many communities and has such a great vision for helping the community grow. In his day job Pat has to manage a lot of database infrastructure, including HA and replication. This post focuses on a few important settings to make sure replication is working well and what to look for when things are going as expected.

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning, I count six blog posts as a huge success for this first PGSQL Phriday. Next month Andreas is going to host and will probably be asking for content around backups (although he’s totally free to change that!).

I hope you’ve learned something and will consider taking part in the future with your own blog post.

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