Thread: Guidlines for a PostgreSQL Speech/Tutorial

Dear all ,

I am an Electronics and Telecommunication engineer some how managed to
come into
development side.
In PostgreSQL I have done a project which is related to Rural Banking.
Here In India we have a annual Linux meet organized by one and only
Asia's Linux magazine
"Linux For You".
I am planning to represent PostgreSQL people in this meet.
But am stuck with following questions :
1. What stuff should I study the most.
2. What topics must I cover in the meet that will give PostgreSQL a  big
boost
3. Should I give a tutorial or just a speech about the features of
PostgreSQL.
4. Scary  topic for me is Object oriented part of PostgreSQL.
5. Their are many more questions but would ask them all once this thread
grows.

moreover I would be happy to receive guidelines and text of any previous
PostgreSQL  presentation from you kind people.

The meet is in January 2005

With Warm Regards,
Vishal Kashyap
http://saihertz.com

Hopeless and I thought I would get help.
Stupid me.

> Dear all ,
>
> I am an Electronics and Telecommunication engineer some how managed to
> come into
> development side.
> In PostgreSQL I have done a project which is related to Rural Banking.
> Here In India we have a annual Linux meet organized by one and only
> Asia's Linux magazine
> "Linux For You".
> I am planning to represent PostgreSQL people in this meet.
> But am stuck with following questions :
> 1. What stuff should I study the most.
> 2. What topics must I cover in the meet that will give PostgreSQL a
> big boost
> 3. Should I give a tutorial or just a speech about the features of
> PostgreSQL.
> 4. Scary  topic for me is Object oriented part of PostgreSQL.
> 5. Their are many more questions but would ask them all once this
> thread grows.
>
> moreover I would be happy to receive guidelines and text of any
> previous PostgreSQL  presentation from you kind people.
>
> The meet is in January 2005
>
> With Warm Regards,
> Vishal Kashyap
> http://saihertz.com
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives?
>
>               http://archives.postgresql.org
>
>

V i s h a l Kashyap @ [Sai Hertz And Control Systems] wrote:
> Hopeless and I thought I would get help.

Well, I'll try.

> > 1. What stuff should I study the most.

Ideally, learn the manual by heart.  People will inevitably ask you
questions about everything you don't know.  Check the mailing lists and
get a feeling for what people want to know most often.  Get a feeling
for what's under development, because people will ask about that.  And
if you don't know, just tell your audience.  You're human.  Just don't
waste everyone's time stumbling for an answer.

> > 2. What topics must I cover in the meet that will give PostgreSQL a
> > big boost

That depends on how you estimate your audience.  If the audience doesn't
know about PostgreSQL, you explain what PostgreSQL is in very general
terms  If the audience already knows about PostgreSQL, you talk about
current development and features.

> > 3. Should I give a tutorial or just a speech about the features of
> > PostgreSQL.

That depends on what you feel up to and what your audience wants.  A
speech is probably best for the purpose of promoting PostgreSQL.

> > 4. Scary  topic for me is Object oriented part of PostgreSQL.

Either you research it or you skip it.  I could give you an explanation
here, but I have had the best results for myself looking up what
"object-relational" means in a book.  Because it's not quite what many
people on these mailing lists will tell you.

> > moreover I would be happy to receive guidelines and text of any
> > previous PostgreSQL  presentation from you kind people.

Go to the library and get three books about "how to hold presentations"
or something like that, and read them.  Work out your timing.  Don't
talk too much about Berkeley in the year 1986, talk about PostgreSQL in
the year 2004/5.  Keep in mind that your audience listens to you
because they want to know what PostgreSQL can do for them.  That should
be the governing theme for everything you have to say.

You can find my presentations at
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/past-events/, but they're
mostly in German.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/

Vishal,

> Hopeless and I thought I would get help.
> Stupid me.

Hey, have some patience!   It's been, what, 24 hours since your original post?

> > I am planning to represent PostgreSQL people in this meet.

When is it?   Can we send you some T-shirts?

> > But am stuck with following questions :
> > 1. What stuff should I study the most.
> > 2. What topics must I cover in the meet that will give PostgreSQL a
> > big boost
> > 3. Should I give a tutorial or just a speech about the features of
> > PostgreSQL.

I don't think anyone else can answer these questions for you.   None of us
know what you do and don't know, and I can only speculate what would appeal
to an Indian convention which I'd not heard of before.

Take a look at who attends this convention.  Is it programmers?  Business
people?  OSS companies? Mixed?  What?

> > 4. Scary  topic for me is Object oriented part of PostgreSQL.

Object-Relational, please!   We aren't Object-Oriented.

> > moreover I would be happy to receive guidelines and text of any
> > previous PostgreSQL  presentation from you kind people.

Bruce has a number of presentations online.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

On Sat, 2004-08-14 at 12:34 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:

>
> > > 4. Scary  topic for me is Object oriented part of PostgreSQL.
>

IMO, the best way to tackle a scary topic, especially if you are not in
a time crunch, is to come up with a toy project that makes use of that
feature and just sit down an work on it.  As it happens, I was getting
ready to do just that, since I have only a passing familiarity with with
pgsql's object relational features.  From what I do know about it, I
think it sounds scarier than it is.

I think that if you know your target audience, confidence in your
presentation will increase in proportion to your hands on experience.

If you have until January, that gives you plenty of time.

Hope this helps.

-Steve

Josh Berkus wrote:
> > > 4. Scary  topic for me is Object oriented part of PostgreSQL.
>
> Object-Relational, please!   We aren't Object-Oriented.

Being object-oriented is an integral part of being object-relational.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/

Peter,

> > Object-Relational, please!   We aren't Object-Oriented.
>
> Being object-oriented is an integral part of being object-relational.

Maybe -- but we are NOT an Object-Oriented Database, which is a different
animal entirely.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

> Hopeless and I thought I would get help.
> Stupid me.

<snip>

>> moreover I would be happy to receive guidelines and text of any
>> previous PostgreSQL  presentation from you kind people.

Now that you have shown that you are one of the unkind people, why do
you still expect help from us kind ones?

Chris

Dear Christopher .

>> Hopeless and I thought I would get help.
>> Stupid me.
>
>
> <snip>
>
>>> moreover I would be happy to receive guidelines and text of any
>>> previous PostgreSQL  presentation from you kind people.
>>
>
> Now that you have shown that you are one of the unkind people, why do
> you still expect help from us kind ones?

Thanks for categorizing people on this list. I was not aware that my
words hurts someone. I was just expressing my disappointment.

In any ways thanks a lot.


Best Regards,
Vishal Kashyap

On Sat, 2004-08-14 at 13:10, V i s h a l Kashyap @ [Sai Hertz And
Control Systems] wrote:
> Hopeless and I thought I would get help.
> Stupid me.
>
> > Dear all ,
> >
> > I am an Electronics and Telecommunication engineer some how managed to
> > come into
> > development side.
> > In PostgreSQL I have done a project which is related to Rural Banking.
> > Here In India we have a annual Linux meet organized by one and only
> > Asia's Linux magazine
> > "Linux For You".
> > I am planning to represent PostgreSQL people in this meet.
> > But am stuck with following questions :
> > 1. What stuff should I study the most.
> > 2. What topics must I cover in the meet that will give PostgreSQL a
> > big boost
> > 3. Should I give a tutorial or just a speech about the features of
> > PostgreSQL.
> > 4. Scary  topic for me is Object oriented part of PostgreSQL.
> > 5. Their are many more questions but would ask them all once this
> > thread grows.
> >
> > moreover I would be happy to receive guidelines and text of any
> > previous PostgreSQL  presentation from you kind people.
> >
> > The meet is in January 2005
> >
> > With Warm Regards,
> > Vishal Kashyap
> > http://saihertz.com

I'd be glad to help.  I was on vacation over the weekend and didn't see
your message.  I hope it's ok with you if I take a vacation every now
and then I know how much you pay me to sit here and answer your posts
for you, oh wait a minute.  Anyway...  I've still got 600 emails from
the lists I'm subscribed to that I need to slog through, so this won't
be the long version.

Here are some of the facts I generally cover when giving a postgresql
speech:

MVCC and the fact that postgresql indexes always point into the data
store (i.e. you never get the value from just the index) means
postgresql switches to seq scans quicker than other databases.

PostgreSQL is quite programmable, with a dozen or so procedural
languages.

PostgreSQL is designed to have the power plug pulled while in the middle
of transactions, and it should come back up coherent and ready to run in
minutes.

PostgreSQL's DDL as well as DML is fully transactable, except, of
course, create / drop database.

PostgreSQL is designed to handle massive parallel loads well, and can
take advantage of large disk sets on RAID 1+0 / RAID 5 et. al. but tends
to not be CPU bound much.

aggregates tend to be slow for certain operations, and their work
arounds (i.e. select id from table order by id limit 1 instead of
max(id) ).

I usually give a full blown demonstration, using the psql command prompt
to show the simple yet powerful interface and what a user can do with
it.

Don't worry about administration so much, that's for later.

I don't for the most part use any of the object relation stuff (i.e.
inheritance) when using postgresql, as I'm a bit more of a relational
purist.  I also don't use arrayed types, since 99.9% of the time another
table works better.

There are some things online from Bruce's and Tom's and a few other
folks presentations in the past at places like OSCON.

However, PostgreSQL 8.0 just entered beta, so those guys are VERY busy.
Take a look at the OSCON section of the O'Reilley site to see what's
hanging there, and I'll see what I can dig up.  But give the guys making
this database a break for now, they're working hard on making it better
and getting through beta, which is a breathtakingly fast moving process,
leaving them little time to chat on the advocacy lists at the moment.