About My Nomination, And How To Vote

First of all, a big THANK YOU to everybody who reached out congratulating me for becoming a finalist in the “Technologist of the Year” nomination. This nomination is especially important for me, because I’ve always strived to apply the best CS theories for the success of the business. I do not believe in approaches, which can’t be used in practice. However, I think that applying the right theoretical principles in the industry can have a tremendous impact.

Another aspect important to me is that all my innovations are related to PostgreSQL. If I were asked to name the three most important things which I’ve introduced at Braviant Holdings, it would be

• The wide usage of FDW both in OLAP and OLTP
• The usage of pg_bitemporal in both OLAP and OLTP
• Abandoning ORM and using JSON -based data exchange between applications and databases

There is more in my blog about all of the above, but what I want to point now – each of these Top 3 is about using PostgreSQL in an innovative way.

The award descriptions say:

Presented to the individual whose talent has championed true innovation, either through new applications of existing technology or the development of technology to achieve a truly unique product or service.

Isn’t it precisely what I just said :)? Do I want to win? Absolutely! Do I think I can win? Yes! Can you help me :)?…

Several people reach out to me, telling me that they have difficulties casting their votes. I agree that the voting process is at least contra-intuitive. So let me explain it step by step.

First, you go to that link.

Then, click where it is said to CREATE LOGIN. It says that you can login with your Facebook account, but this does not work. So you will need to create a login. After that, you need to click on the large grey “Like” on the very top. Wait for a response to make sure your vote is counted.

Also, there are SHARE buttons, and unfortunately, the most important one – Share on LinkedIn – does not work. Others work fine, so you can help me by sharing with your network 🙂

And one more thing – this voting is only opened till August 16, so please don’t delay 🙂

Once again – THANK YOU!

Advertisements

Postgres DEI Work Group

Last Friday, I participated in the first conference call of the DEI Work Group of PostgresConf. And if you are wondering what DEI means, it means Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion.

The whole conversation started at the PostgresConf  2019 in New York. There we had a diversity panel on the last day of the conference. I was mildly unhappy with both low attendance and somewhat too universal coverage of the issues of diversity. I think that the striking lack of diversity in the Postgres community is a bigger problem than in IT in general, and was expecting a more in-depth conversation.

And then a usual exchange happened. I am a person of action, and I can’t complain about anything without proposing a solution (even when nobody asks for one!). But this time I was actually asked whether I will be interested in doing something to improve the situation, and granted, I said Yes!

Now all the things I finally coming together. Details are available at the PostgresConf web site in the July Newsletter.

I am really looking forward to working on improving the situation, because – guess what?  – I have some ideas! And all my friends and colleagues, current and former, know that if I believe something should be done – it will be done 🙂

PostgreSQL And Academia

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships between the PostgreSQL community and the DB research community. To put it bluntly – these two communities do not talk to each other!

There are many reasons why I am concerned about this situation. First, I consider myself belonging to both of these communities. Even if right now I am 90% in industry, I can’t write off my academic past and writing a scientific paper with the hope of being accepted to the real database conference is something which appeals to me.

Second, I want to have quality candidates for the database positions when I have them. The problem is more than scientists do not speak at the Postgres conferences, and Postgres developers do not speak at the academic conferences. The bigger problem is that for many CS students, their academic research and practical experience to not intersect at all! They study some cool algorithms, and then they practice their SQL on MySQL databases, which as I have already mentioned multiple times, lacks so many basic database features, that it hardly can be considered a database!

If these students practiced using PostgreSQL, they would have a real full-scale object-relational database, not a “light” version, but a real thing, which supports tons of index types, data types, constraints, has procedural language, and the list can go on and on.

It is especially upsetting to see this disconnect since so many database researches were completed on Postgres, for Postgres, with the help of Postgres; R-trees and GIST indexes, to name a couple. Also, the SIGMOD Test of Time Award in 2018 was given to the paper “Serializable isolation for snapshot databases”, which was implemented in Postgres.

I know the answer to the question “why they do not talk?” Researches do not want to talk at the Postgres conferences, because those are not scientific conferences, and the participation in these conferences will not result in any publication. Postgres developers do not want to talk at the CS conferences, because they do not like to write long papers :), and also, even if they do submit something, their papers often are rejected as “not having any scientific value.”

I know the answer. But I do not like it :). So maybe – we can talk about it?!

Let’s Go Bitemporal!

Dear friends and followers from the Postgres community! Today, let’s talk more about the bitemporal library (as if I did not speak enough about it yet!).

We have been developing Postgres functions, which support bitemporal operation for almost four years by now. We have found our initial inspiration in the Asserted Versioning Framework (AVF), first introduced by Jonson and Weiss nearly twenty years ago. There is nothing new in the concept of incorporating time dimension into data, and even the concept of two-dimensional time is not new. However, we believe that AVF approaches the task in the best possible way and that it allows making the time a true and integral part of data.

We believe that Postgres is suited the best to support a two-dimensional time due to the tow factors: the presence of the interval types and GIST with exclusion constraints. Having these two available made the process of implementation of the concept more or less trivial.

Implementation of bitemporal operations took some time, though, and we are still in the process of improving some of the functions. However, we are happy to share with the world, that Bravinat Holdings runs both OLTP and OLAP databases on the bitemporal framework with no performance degradation. Since we had an opportunity to develop as we go, we could address lots of issues in this implementation, which we initially did not even expect.
Recently we have uploaded several files into the docs section of the pg_bitemporal GitHub repo, including several presentations and short papers so that those who are interested can read more on the theory of bitemporality. We hope that people will give it a try – it works! Also, we are always looking for volunteers who will be interested in collaboration.

Please check us out at https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal

July Chicago PUG was a success!

We had a great meetup of Chicago PUG last night with the first appearance of YugaByte DB. Thank you so much, Amey Banarse, for a very informative and engaging presentation!
Please take notice that there will be no meetup in August – enjoy the rest of the Summer, and I will see you all in September. Watch for the announcement!

PG Open submission deadline is extended!

To all my Postgres-minded friends and colleagues – the submission deadline for PG Open talks and tutorials has been extended. You have till July 7 to submit your proposal! See updated info.
Please consider, if you didn’t submit yet!

Bitemporal documentation is available!

Everybody who was curious enough to start using our pg_bitemporal github repo would complain about the lack of documentation, so we’ve tried really hard to provide our follows with some guidance.

What we have now, is very far from perfect, but if you go to the docs directory, there is a lot of documentation, including our old presentations, explanations of the basic bitemporal concepts and most importantly first ever bitemporal functions manual, which we promise to make more readable in the nearest future. Meanwhile – please share your feedback! Thank you!