visit to NOSQL meetup

All,

I want to tell you of my experience I had this past week when I attended a NOSQL/Hadoop meeting held downtown Seattle.

The purpose of my visit was to see what it was going to take to increase interest in our user group, i.e. seapug. I learned a number interesting facts.

It was a group of around 60 people and. of course, the requisite pizza and munchies were on hand. The audience was almost entirely made up of techies but there were the odd pointed-head types too.

Due to their size, the meeting was run formally with an agenda and a schedule. As far I'm concerned this just confirms that intimate groups like ours is just fine with an informal approach offering more opportunities for our audience participation.

The first presentation started and I had the first, of many, shocks ... the talk was about PostgreSQL!

The presenter describe their company's data infrastructure as a standard three-tier stuff with front-end, web-server and datastore layer. The datastore was "exclusively" postgres. This company wasn't small fry either, they handled a number of very well known vendor payment transactions including Heroku. They talked about the need to maintain Five9s (a downtime of no more than 5.26 minutes per year). Although he talked a bit of the applications layer it was mostly about their two cluster (2-nodes in each cluster) Master-Slave configuration situated at the bottom of the stack.

As far as I was concerned the talk was exactly the kind that we, seapug, would appreciate and enjoy.

I had half expected the audience to be respectful but not near as interested as me. I was wrong, they ate it up like free donuts. At the end of the talk even the organizer complimented the presentation as being an excellent and 'relevant' talk.

The main talk came next; it was a plug for the sponsor's technology describing infrastructure as a service i.e. a big data datastore infrastructure based upon couchDB. So far so good, this was the kind of talk I expected to hear. That is until he started going into the latest service upgrade which was the introduction of GIS capabilities. And here's the next shocker.. he proudly stated that it wouldn't be too long before it approached the same quality and capabilities as PostGIS!

After the meeting I ended up speaking with one of their managers and it was too good to resist when I asked "If you're attempting to introduce a service using GIS that's as good as PostGIS then why not use it instead". Of course the answer was something about how the developers designed it from the ground up to work as best as possible. I then pointed out that it was trivial (well not too trivial) to connect postgres directly from Hadoop and still get the GIS features they wanted to sell. Then I threw her the bone "It is true for every 10 developers you can only find one good DBA" and swallowed it when she agreed wholeheartedly.

So what did I learn?

PostgreSQL is used far more extensively here in Seattle then I could have imagined.

PostgreSQL is considered part of the basic skill set for the average developer in the NOSQL world.

Without being too nasty, the average developer is a MySQL refugee looking for a new home (thank you Oracle!).

Finally, there are people involved in PostgreSQL enough to give talks but can still benefit from a dedicated group such as ours. I'd like to reach out and invite the guy who gave the first talk to come to our user-group. I'll provide more information at the next meeting this week.

Comments?

Robert