Středa březen 07, 2007

Elephant in Berlin

The last week (Feb 27 - Mar 2 2007) German Unix User Group organized the first OpenSolaris Developer Conference. I had a pleasure to attend this conference and present there about PostgreSQL and its integration into Solaris. I was also surprised how strong Unix community is in Germany. The first day focused on technology inside SMF, RBAC, DTrace and also on OpenSolaris project itself. The second day was about alternative Solaris distributions, like BeleniX, Nexenta and others.

All presentations were very good and I learned new and interesting information. If I should choose only one presentation, Looking into the black-box - how the kernel may impact your application presented by Thomas Nau would be the winner. Thomas Nau described how to use a lot of system tools include D-Trace for analysis application bottlenecks and he demonstrated these tools on a real problem.

My presentation started at 4:30pm when many people already left the conference, however, ca thirty five folks still stayed to listen to my talk. The talk presented how SMF and RBAC is implemented for PostgreSQL and also showed how DTrace user probes are integrated into PostgreSQL 8.2. Presentation generated a few questions and most of them focused on high availability and load balancing solution for PostgeSQL. Unfortunately, PostgreSQL does not have functionality similar to Oracle cluster. However, SunCluster version 3.2 provides failover data service for PostgreSQL.

Me in speaker role.

Conferences are also good place to meet people and discuss various things. I talked with Sasa Gorshenev about Sun Studio compiler and its optimization. He gave me some ideas how to tune PostgreSQL. Frank Batschulat also joined the conference and we discussed how to setup disk access to get best performance for databases.

And what to write at the end? It was amazing conference and I hope I will attend it the next year again.