Pátek červenec 21, 2006

PostgreSQL code sprint

The Postgres conference finished on Sunday, but postgres hackers stayed in Toronto until Tuesday at the Code Sprint sponsored by SUN. Over 30 hacker were in one room and spent these extra days on coding the last features to postgres 8.2. Flipcharts were written up very quickly during brainstorming sessions. Tom Lane and Bruce Momjiam did not have time to have a rest. Many problems were solved (at least on the flipchart) and I hope that postgrest 8.2 will be released soon. Feature freeze has been announced to July, 31st.

Code Sprint

Bill Franklin attended this code sprint as well. He spoke with many hackers and was interested in their work. I think that the conference was a good experience for me, my colleagues and for Sun too. See you on the next code sprint ...

Sun postgres hackers

Josh, Robert, Jim, Zdenek, Dhanaraj

Čtvrtek červenec 20, 2006

PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit

PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit performed in Toronto from 8th and 9th July 2006. This summit was the first occasion to meeting postgres hacker face to face in its ten years history like opensource and free project. The conference unofficially started day before on 7th July evening with small refreshment in the hotel lobby. Many people met first time and everybody tried to assigned mailing address to real person. It was a little bit funny. I met with my Indian colleague Dhanaraj in hotel day before, but I have never seen my US colleagues. For example Jim's photo is little bit out of date. Fortunately, Jim identified us. The all group of hacker moved to boat for dinner and for ongoing person identification and unlimited discussion about postgres.

Toronto evening

Main conference started on Saturday morning by Josh Berkus. He invited all conference participant and said thanks to conference sponsors. Sun was one of them. After this he gave floor to Bruce Momjian. Bruce is one of people who ware presented releasing of postgres source code ten years ago. He talked what happened during this time.

Next presentations had been divided to two separate tracks. Many of presentation ware related to present new projects. Korry Douglas showed PL/SQL debugger based on postgres proxy server which is stored close to main server. Communication is based on standard plsql protocol and debugger features are implemented as standard stored functions. Simon Riggs continued with presentation about performance problems. However, some problem generated big discussion and unfortunately, Simon did not have time to finished his all presentation.

Saturday afternoon was dedicated to Neil Conway's and Gavin Sherri's introduction to postgres hacking. It was very useful practical presentation based on real feature implementation.

Contributors dinner was closing Saturday. I met and talked with many people. I spoke with Luke Lonergan, CTO of GreenPlum company, about ZFS and its scalability. He connected from his PDA to his home server and shown me version of running opensolaris. Yes, My OpenSolaris T-Shirt identified me and many people ask me about our postgres support and future strategy. Many people trust us but not all of them. I spoke with Skype developers from Estonia. I asked them if they plan skype version for solaris. Unfortunately, no. They have version for linux, but they afraid that sound subsystem is different on solaris and is not easy to port skype on solaris. I'm not solaris sound guru, but if anybody interesting in it, I have a their email addresses. The local band interrupted all discussions and I went to the hotel.

Second day was opened by Robert Lor and his famous D-Trace presentation. Robert shown only part of D-Trace capabilities, but it was enough to persuade community. Community have accepted D-Trace and it will be implemented in the postgres 8.2. Andrew Dunstan presented buildfarm framework status and its problems and their solution. However, some buildfarm problems are still opened and is need of more investigation. Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev spoke about new features and improvements in the T-Search 2 project (full text search) and shown a big TODO list as well.

Robert Lor

Sunday lunch I spent in Elephant pub on Yonge Street (longest street in the World). Bruce with his colleague came little bit later into this pub and Bruce invited me to join the lunch with them. Yes, really I had a lunch with Bruce Momjiam. You can see it on picture below. I asked him about future of his TODO list, if there are any plans to replace this TODO list by some bug tracking system. He answered that there were many discussion about it but all bug tracking system is too complicated for postgres purpose and hackers using primary mails for solving problem and there no exist any relevant system integrated it.

Me and Bruce

Peter Eisentraut and Josh Berkus closed the conference and all attendants went to take group photo.

And what is conclusion? Italy won World Championship in Football (for US citizens soccer :-). And conference had big success and big benefit for all attendants. Interest of this conference was three time bigger than available capacity. We can expect that next conference will be early maybe next year. I'm looking forward to it.

Neděle červenec 16, 2006

Czech Republic championship in Programming for Young People

How you can read on Tomas Heran or Roman Strobl blogs, the Czech Republic championship in Programming for Young People occurred on last June weekend (23rd - 25th June) in the Janske Lazne. Forty youth have been divided by age to the two categories and they spent four hours to solve their task. It was 20th volume and first when Sun was co-sponsor of this competition. There is a place to say thanks to Pavel Suk and Lukas Rovensky for their interest in it. The Sun presentation described Tomas and Roman on their blog and I will not repeat it. I want focus on another think. I want focus on the history, present and future of this competition.

How I wrote it was 20th volume. I started in this competition at 1988 like competitors. It was age of 8-bits computers like ZX Spectrum, Atari, Commodore ... All competitors wrote their program in the basic. Final version of program must be rewritten to the paper, because hardware and storage media were unreliable and jury spent lot of time to check all solutions. However, There were many youth and adults which interest in. I remember that one competitor toke iron and started to solder his modified Spectrum during competition.

The turbo pascal and quick basic on MS-DOS replaced basic on 8-bits computer since 1991/92. Only two of competitors used C. However, C is good language, but not for speed programing.

How time went I was too old to stay like competitor and I have started like member of Jury (since 1995). We have started to submit one complex task instead many small tasks. I remember one task was text editor with blocks feature. Four hours were enough for many competitors to solve this task and it was very difficult to choice winner. Pacman was task next year and it was difficult to avoid to play pacman and finish evaluation.

Next change came about 1998 when MS Win push out MS-DOS. RAD tools (Delphi/Visual Basic) started to play major role in programming and task was adjusted for new programming environment. But what happened. Number of competitors in all Czechia go down and their quality too. We started to search where is problem. What is root cause?

I think there are many causes. First is that RAD tools are good for quick user interface design, however, implement algorithm is difficult and people use only prepared component without knowledge of their internals. Programing requests bigger and bigger knowledge and is difficult to start. There is no easy way how to write program "Hello world!". The barrier is multiply by the Windows which covers everything under graphics interface.

The next cause is quality of programming lessons. Many good programmers taught children at the beginning of nineties. They taught very often in the centers of children free time. However, they have lost time for teaching and new teachers don't have experience. Pavel asked me, if I know about some place in Beroun where his child could start to learn programming. I said him "Beroun had good center for children with very good teachers." I tried to find some contact person, but I must say again "Beroun had ...". Nobody teach children to programming in Beroun now. It is common scenario in all Czechia. Only few centers teach children to programming and many children prefer game playing.

The Sun cooperate with many Universities and it shares our technology knowledge with students. It is very good. But Universities expect basic programming knowledge from their new students. It should be problem in the future. Many excellent musician start play when their was young children. It is similarly with programming skill. The question is where young children can start learn programming and who will be their teachers?

I afraid that if we can solve it quickly we will have problem find excellent programmers in the near future.