PGWest: Day 1 and 2

So my blogging of PGWest was a FAIL on the first day, as I never got around to following up my Day 0 post with anything, so with apologies, here's a quick roundup of day 1 and day 2.

Day 1 


Started with breakfast with Magnus, Devrim and Guillaume before heading up to register on the mezzanine. The first half of the day was a number of three hour tutorials which were on some interesting topics, but none which particularly interested me, so I spent the time catching up with a number of colleagues who I haven't seen in a few months.

After lunch, my talk on "Securing your web application" was one of the first 'normal' talks to be given. It was intended as a wide but shallow look at some of the security issues to consider when building a web app - a completely new talk which unfortunately didn't work as well as I'd hoped and needs some tweaking should I give it again; trimming the length a little, and focusing a little more on the database end of the stack. Still, I think it covered most of the important points for new developers to consider.

After my talk, I spent more time with colleagues, including $BOSS who had arrived. I completely failed to see any more talks unfortunately.

In the evening, we had a quick drink (thanks SFPUG!) before heading off for dinner at an Irish pub, and then to the Starlight Room at the top of the hotel for a couple of drinks and dessert, coupled with lots of discussion on covering indexes (aka index-only scans), managing community workload and more.

Day 2


Day 2 started with JD herding a handful of us together at breakfast to go and give Josh Berkus some encouragement in his talk on the PostgreSQL Community. An excellent talk for the newcomers in the room, though a little wasted on those of us who have been around the community for 10+ years.

Highlight of the day was Scott McNealy's keynote, introduced by Ed Boyajian ($BIG_BOSS at EnterpriseDB). In case you've been living under a rock, you'll doubtless know that Scott was the founder and boss of Sun Microsystems until the Oracle takeover. The talk style was a little deadpan, but with a good stream of jokes that went down well with the audience. Interesting to hear Scott note that he was considered a good capitalist, whilst Larry Ellison is a great capitalist (who doesn't like to share)!

Scott's talk was followed up with JD's introduction to the conference (yeah, halfway through the schedule - really Josh?), and then lunch. After a quick EnterpriseDB training meeting, I caught Jimbo's talk on GridSQL, Magnus' on database driven cache invalidation with Varnish (which we'll be using with the new PostgreSQL website backend, so I figured I should learn how it works), and then finally Bruce's new talk, MVCC Unmasked. Pretty complex for the newbie I suspect, but a very well presented topic.

And on that note it's just about time to go back up to the Starlight Room, where the EnterpriseDB party is about to kick off with an open bar. I'll try not to get too hungover so I can write about day 3 tomorrow....

PGWest: Day 0...

... or day 1, depending on how you look at it. Anyway, mostly yesterday, the day before the conference starts. Which is today. Obviously. $DEITY I hate jetlag-induced early mornings, especially when coupled with reminders for meetings on the East coast that go "ping" right as I'm finally drifting off to sleep again at 6AM.

Anyway, enough about that. The flight from LHR to SFO was mostly uneventful, barring an APU failure which meant the HVAC was barely working until we took off. It got a little hot, but otherwise everything was good, and being completely cut off from email, twitter and IM for nearly 11 hours meant that I managed to get a bunch of work done that's been piling up for ages and watch the A-Team.

Immigration at SFO was remarkably fast (I've only seen similar speeds in the past in Boston), which gave me plenty of time to queue up with a bunch of other passengers for over 10 minutes before a single cab showed up. What the *$£% is that about?

Made it to the hotel, which took a little longer than expected due to the World Series (I'm sure I won't be the first, or the last to note that that's a really misleading name) to find a whole gaggle of elephant herders in the lobby, with beer. Oh, and one dolphin botherer (hi Rob!). Dinner was at a small, but excellent Indonesian place on Post and Jones where Greg Stark showed up from work to join myself, Aurynn Shaw, Bruce Momjian, Magnus Hagander, Jim Nasby, Rob Wultsch and Guillaume Lelarge.

After dinner, a few of us stopped in the hotel bar for a night cap before heading off for some Zzzz's.

Today the conference starts in earnest of course. Breakfast in 20 minutes, and then at 9AM, a bunch of 3 hour tutorials. After lunch, my talk "Securing your web application" (and overview for beginners) is up, then I have the rest of the conference to see what I like.

So, there you have it. A couple of hundred largely useless words that spilled out of my brain having cleared out my "Starred Items" at 5AM leaving me nothing more interesting to do without committing more hours than I have. With any luck, tomorrow's roundup will be somewhat less of a waste of bytes, though someone did mention beer so I wouldn't hold your breath....

PGDay Europe 2010 schedule announced

I'm pleased to be able to say that the schedule for this year's PGDay Europe conference in Stuttgart, Germany on the 6th - 8th December 2010 is now available.

We have a bumper crop of talks this year, with 13 sessions in German, 26 in English, 2 keynotes and a key signing party!

We're pleased to welcome Free and Open Source veteran, Simon Phipps as the presenter of our opening keynote. Simon is well known for his involvement with various organisations including GNOME, OpenSolaris and OpenJDK and will be talking about some of the changes we've been seeing in the Open Source world recently as projects evolve and corporate involvement changes. He is perhaps best known for his role as Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems where he oversaw the companies Open Source activities.

Of course, we also have some great technical talks lined up for developers, DBAs and people considering using or deploying Postgres, on topics such as PostGIS, application development, PostgreSQL internals, clustering and replication and more all in the comfortable surroundings of a top hotel.

For the first time we've also added a day of training sessions to the schedule this year (at extra cost). Training will be available on PostgreSQL administration, application development and PostGIS, with some courses in German and some in English.

As always, we reserve the right to adjust the schedule in the event of unforeseen circumstances.

So, if you haven't done so already, head on over to the website and register your attendance at the conference. You won't regret it!

See you in Stuttgart!

PGDay.EU 2010 Call for Papers ending soon!

This years European PostgreSQL Conference is due to be held on the 6 - 8th December 2010 in Stuttgart Germany. Following on from last years extremely successful event in Paris, we hope to make the show bigger and better than before, with:

• A 4 star hotel venue
  
• A special guest keynote speaker (to be announced Real Soon Now :-) )
  
• Multiple talk tracks in English and German
  
• Talks for PostgreSQL hackers and users, as well as decision makers

Of course, to make that happen we need talks proposals from our community members and users, so if you can make it to Germany in December, please take a look at the call for papers page on the website, and send in your proposal before the 11th October!

See you in Stuttgart.

Cleaning up the Oracle mess

I've been caught off-guard by the number of news stories that have been posted about Oracle turning off their Solaris boxes that participated in the PostgreSQL Buildfarm and the fact that I've been working to replace them. I think most of us in the community assumed it was going to happen sooner or later - Sun were contributors to PostgreSQL, but once they bought MySQL I think it was the beginning of the end of their contributions to the project. Being acquired by Oracle was the solid-gold nail in the coffin.

Anyway, just to clarify a few points in some of the articles I've seen:

1. My employer and corporate contributor to PostgreSQL, EnterpriseDB is providing the hardware for the new buildfarm members. We try to give back to the community wherever we can, and this is one thing that we can do quite easily.
    
2. So far I've enabled two Solaris SPARC buildfarm members, one running the Sun Studio compiler, and one using GCC. There are equivalent Solaris Intel members being setup at the moment, as well as a couple of Windows 7 ones using VC++ 2008 32 and 64 bit.
    
3. Contrary to reports and what might be inferred from the short bio on my blog, I actually work for EnterpriseDB on a full time basis. The "in my spare time I work for..." bit was my poor British attempt at humour. Sorry 'bout that - it won't happen again!

Well, that's about it I guess. We now return you to your scheduled programming.

Postgres, Passwords and Installers

By far the most common issues we see reported with the "one-click" PostgreSQL installers that we build here at EnterpriseDB are password related. In this post I'll explain what the passwords are, why we need them, and how to reset them.

Superuser Password

The Superuser Password is used by Postgres to secure the built-in "postgres" superuser account in the database itself. This is the only account found in a fresh installation. The password is setup during the initial installation of the database server, and may be changed at any point in the future using pgAdmin, or by issuing an SQL query such as:

ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD 'VeryVerySecret';


The superuser password is not required to upgrade Postgres to a newer version, however it will be required if you install certain StackBuilder modules, such as PostGIS or any of the PHP applications that are available. The password is required for these installers because they connect to the database server and create databases and other objects required to run the software.


Service Password

The service password is the one that tends to confuse people. Postgres runs under a special operating system user account for security reasons. This account is created on your machine when the installer runs, and unless overridden on the command line, it will be called "postgres". On Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X, the account is setup without a password and users generally never need to worry about it again.

On Windows however, things are slightly different. In a normal installation of Postgres we'll setup the service account on Windows to use the same password that we use for the superuser account (expert users can override this behaviour using command line options for the installer). We need to do this because Windows requires that service accounts have secured passwords.

Note: If you change the superuser password in the future, that does not change the service password as well.

When you upgrade Postgres on Windows, in order to re-install the service we need to know the service password which is why the installer will require that it be re-entered correctly.

If you have forgotten the password, you can reset it on the command line (there are GUI tools that can be used as well, but they are not available on all versions of Windows). Start a command prompt, and then enter a command like:

net user postgres *

Update from Craig Ringer (19/11/2012): Note that this command must be run in a command prompt with Administrative rights. Remember, under UAC, even if you have local admin access you have to explicitly run programs with admin rights. Shift-right-click on "Command Prompt" in the Start menu and choose "Run as administrator" from the context menu.

You will be prompted to enter and confirm a new password for the user. If you do this, you must then also update the password in the service configuration for any Postgres or related services (such as pgAgent or pgBouncer) that may use the account, or expect them to fail to start at the next reboot. You can do this using the Services management console which can be found in the Administrative Tools folder. Just right-click each service, select Properties, and enter the new password and click OK.

We get a lot of people asking us to reset their service password, as they mistakenly think it's related to either their Postgres Community Login, or their account on the EnterpriseDB website. It's not - and we cannot change it for you!

Uninstallation


If you uninstall Postgres, the service account will not be removed from the operating system. This is because each individual uninstaller has no way of knowing if you are using the service account with other packages or installations. This isn't a huge problem unless you come to reinstall Postgres at a later time and realise you've completely forgotten what the password was set to - in which case you can reset it as shown above. If you prefer to remove the account, you can use a command like:

net user postgres /delete

Update from Craig Ringer (19/11/2012): Note that this command must be run in a command prompt with Administrative rights. Remember, under UAC, even if you have local admin access you have to explicitly run programs with admin rights. Shift-right-click on "Command Prompt" in the Start menu and choose "Run as administrator" from the context menu.

Summary

So to recap, we have Superuser passwords which are used to secure the database server's superuser account, and on Windows a service password to secure the operating system service account used by Postgres. Accounts use the same username (postgres) and the same password in a normal installation, but either password can be changed independently of the other post-installation. Both passwords are specific to your own machine, and can be changed (or the service account deleted) as shown.

For a walkthrough of the installation process, please see this guide.

If you need any further assistance having read this post, please use the pgsql-general@postgresql.org mailing list, or the EnterpriseDB Forums.

Postgres Testimonials

Those of you who attended PG East in Philadelphia earlier this year may recall that we were recording user testimonials on video. Well, we've finally got a bunch of those edited and ready for public consumption - you can find them on the EnterpriseDB YouTube channel.

These videos are ideal material to help persuade your boss or co-workers to adopt Postgres - for example, this video features Jim Nasby talking about how Enova Financial managed $1 billion worth of loans last year using Postgres, having previously scrapped MySQL after just a few months of use.



Check them out. Spread the word.