This May, I attended my first international conference: PGCon 2014. Though the schedule spanned from May 20th to May 23rd, I came primarily for the talks. Then there was the Unconference on the 24th. I’d never heard of such a thing, but it was billed as a good way to network and find out what community members want from PostgreSQL. After attending the Unconference, I must admit I’m exceptionally glad it exists; it’s something I believe every strong Open Source project needs.
Recently, I’ve come to the conclusion my tastebuds are changing somewhat drastically. How so? As it turns out, where once I couldn’t even tolerate medium heat, and Taco Bell Medium sauce packets were the equivalent of agony, now all commonly available hot sauces only impart a mild zip.
Tabasco? Watery vinegar. Frank’s Red Hot? Tomato sauce. Cholula? Ketchup. Sriracha? Garlic ketchup. Insanity, to put it bluntly, and it was becoming a problem.
Another free book giveaway? What, am I running a library here? Well, it turns out Packt liked my review of Instant PostgreSQL Starter so much, they want me host a short period where you can obtain your very own copy for the low, low price of $0.
To those ends, I have a few brand new digital copies comprised of shiny premium electrons ready to dispense to three lucky commenters. Does that sound good?
It occurs to me I forgot to congratulate the winners of the free ebooks. So without further ado:
SAB, who seems to host a nice blog geared toward server administration. Stephan, who’s looking to improve existing strategies. Jeff and his growing PostgreSQL cluster. Pierre, who apparently has an experimental PostgreSQL backend for MySQL. Interesting. Congrats to the winners. But more, I call upon them to pay it forward by contributing to the community, either by corresponding with the excellent PostgreSQL mailing lists, or maybe submitting a patch or two to the code.
A little while ago, I wrote to the PostgreSQL general mailing list that I’d been approached by Packt Publishing to contribute a quick manual on doing PostgreSQL backups: Instant PostgreSQL Backup and Restore How-to. They’re the same guys who published Greg Smith’s PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance book which everyone seems to swear by.
The goal of the backup book was to distill the PostgreSQL documentation, tools, and Wiki down to a collection of short step-by-step guides much like the O’Reilly nutshell series.
