december meeting wrapup

Hello!

Thank you everyone for attending last night's meeting! I had such a
good time. We had a great turnout - ten people! I was able to give
Audrey my last copy of the Douglas' PostgreSQL book, and we all
participated in hazing a new guy, James, who claimed to like Python
and had the best quote of the night (pardon me if I make a mistake in
the retelling):

Randal: "Start a nested loop, and you can go get a cup of coffee..."
James: "Uh - start a nested loop, and you better go to Columbia and
pick your own beans."

During introductions (which happened at the end of the meeting), we
learned not only that James is working on an "Anti-Rails" framework,
but that we had Audrey, the Rails developer, on hand -- setting the
stage for our first PDXPUG grudge match.

But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Gabrielle started the meeting off with her programming travelogue,
which for a short time can be found at: http://www.hevanet.com/
gabrielle/slide0.html

I really enjoyed her approach to project sharing -- I'd love to hear
impressions from the rest of you who were there. We're trying to
come up with re-occurring features, and it would be nice if different
people could drop in and give a presentation from their project
journals.

I gave the second presentation entitled "EXPLAIN: briefly". I will
post the slides this evening. They include links to further reading,
and build off of the queries Gabrielle used. I would just have
Randal forward the PDF I sent him, but it contained a few errors that
I'm fixing before I post the final version.

I've gotten two volunteers for April/May presentations, but we need
some ideas for January/February/March! Please don't be shy.

Ideas:
* Something awesome you're doing with 8.2
* Something horrible 8.2 fixed for you
* Some other procedural language presentation
* Python and PostgreSQL
* the PostgreSQL C API
* Slony
* What you wish would be in 8.3
* Why you miss David Wheeler at our meetings
* blah blah blah?

---

The next meeting will be on January 16th, 7pm. We will start off
with a 5 minute summary of an EXPLAIN QUERY OPERATOR! I'll bet you
can't wait to find out which one. The main topic is still TBD.

We will close with the obligatory MySQL update. Randal helped us out
last night with the provocative "MySQL has dropped support for most
Linux Distributions." Please keep an eye out for similar gems!

Finally, Rafael raised the spectre of podcasting once again. I will
get everything together to actually do the podcast next time. If
anyone has a USB thumb-drive that they can commit to bringing to the
meeting to help facilitate this, please let me know.

Have a lovely holiday! I'm on vacation starting Friday... so see you
after the new year.

-selena

--
Selena Deckelmann
Information Systems Manager
Chris King Precision Components
www.chrisking.com / 503.972.4050 x230