PG East 2010 will take place at the Radisson Plaza Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on March 25 - 28, 2010 and will feature a number of technical sessions from PostgreSQL community leaders. Programs are designed for administrators, developers, end-users, and students, as well as IT decision-makers, and are designed to help attendees build skills and network with core project contributors in a relaxed atmosphere. There is something for everyone at PGEast, from beginners to advanced users. Even better, the entry fee for non-PgUS members is a donation to PgUS and includes a Professional Membership to PgUS.

OmniTI is excited to be participating and we've planned four technical sessions:

• Know More Waiting, A Guide To PostgreSQL 9.0 by Robert Treat, will give an overview of the upcoming PostgreSQL 9.0 release. While we're still a few months ahead of release, but we have a pretty good idea of what's coming in the next release, and this talk will help you start planning for how you will be able to take advantage of the new features coming our way.
• PostgreSQL, meet AMQP, by Theo Schlossnagle, looks at pg_amqp, a "contrib" style module for Postgres that provides transaction style message queuing from inside of Postgres, using the AMQP standard.
• Yet Another Replication Tool : RubyRep by Denish Patel, will delve into one of the newer Postgres replication solutions on the block. RubyRep is design for dead simple installation and setup, while still delivering advanced features like data comparing, synchronization between servers, and even master-master replication options.
• Database Scalability Patterns by Robert Treat, takes a look at the common patterns around scaling your database solution, and looks at some of the different options available to people scaling with Postgres.

"Anyone dealing with PostgresSQL should consider going; this is an inexpensive and fun way to gain a wealth of knowledge.”

For more agenda information and to register, please visit: http://postgresqlconference.org/

On Thursday morning, Rich talked about the basics of mod_rewrite syntax, pattern lexicons and common rewrite scenarios. He focused on teaching attendees how mod_rewrite mangles and munges URLs in order to make them easy to work with.

Rich recently joined OmniTI as a web engineer, and is the author of Apache Cookbook and The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite. His expertise as part of the Apache Software Foundation and his role as a member of the Apache Documentation Project allows OmniTI to harness his experience and expand client service offerings. His appearance also further bolsters OmniTI’s prominent position within the open source community.

I feel very privileged to join OmniTI, as my role lets me use my expertise to help real companies do exciting things, while maintaining my edge with a wide scope of technologies, including Apache, mod_perl, Perl, and PHP.

On Thursday afternoon, Theo hosted a two—hour session entitled “Scalable Internet Architectures.” He dove into traditional web architectures and explored what makes them work, with a particular focus on analyzing weak points and discussing the effects of the intense pressure that can result from prolonged exposure on prominent web properties like Digg and The New York Times. Theo also drew heavily upon his years of experience in systems monitoring, especially the lessons he’s learned that have culminated in the recent development, release and deployment of OmniTI’s open source monitoring and trending system, Reconnoiter.

If you monitor systems and services, today, without monitoring critical business metrics as well, you are placing yourself at a disadvantage that could be fatal,” said Schlossnagle. “In my session, I plan to share the same expertise in the trending of systems, applications and network metrics that has been captured in Reconnoiter, which has made great strides in both fundamental design and usability.

Apachecon attendees walked away from Rich’s talk with a great understanding of how to use mod_rewrite to its full capabilities. From comments on Twitter, it was apparent that his audience appreciated his in—depth knowledge and clear explanations. His insight into upcoming new features in Apache 2.4 also had many attendees excited for the upcoming release.

Theo drew laughs from the crowd when describing how sharding can be painful, as well as great comments on Twitter for the overall presentation, such as

Theo Schlossnagle’s “Scalable Internet Architectures” is so much fun and informative

Theo explained what architecture means for Internet applications, from static content and dynamic applications to databases and networking. Attendees learned that they need to be aware of how the different levels in architecture interact, and that “fixing” a scaling issue should not simply change the problem. Finally, they learned how good performance can make scaling issues much easier to solve.

One of the most commonly misunderstood concepts in the managerial software engineering world today is that of “technical debt.” In his talk, Theo went over the ins and outs of technical debt and drew parallels between technical debt and the more traditional tool that is financial debt. In his address, Theo noted:

"Many practitioners today use the term technical debt as an excuse to over engineer products. At the same time, many product owners insist on schedules and micro-managed deliverables that result in half-baked products that end up being a messy liability. Tomorrow’s software engineers will need to understand technical debt well enough to use it as a tool to maintain competitive advantage.

This year’s DC PHP 2009 conference attendees are better equipped to leverage technical debt as a tool to their advantage and now have a solid set of guidelines to avoid accruing bad technical debt that will plague them later.

Tell me what company you keep and I'll tell you what you are.

~ Miguel de Cervantes

The ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society delivering resources that advance computing as a science and a profession. As one can imagine, this organization and its mission is of vital importance to companies like OmniTI. Theo has been active in the ACM for over eight years, and describes it value: “I think OmniTI has been so successful because we have the experience (and scars) of being present when theory and practice collide. The ACM is the organization in the best position to bring the wisdom born from those collisions to professionals in our industry.”

It is with great honor that Theo Schlossnagle was recently asked to participate in the editorial board of the acmqueue magazine.

acmqueue provides a critical perspective on current and emerging technologies. Its distinguished Editorial Board makes sure that acmqueue's high-quality content dives deep into the technical challenges and critical questions software engineers should be thinking about.

Distinguished indeed! It is with great pride that we recognize Theo as the leader of our team and an esteemed member of theirs!

On July 22nd in sunny San Jose, California we had the privilege of showing off our latest project: Reconnoiter. Reconnoiter is a new Open Source monitoring systems that provides trending and fault-detection on computing infrastructure that is highly distributed and heterogeneous. Reconnoiter’s goal is to provide the feature set of several common products in a simple, consistent and easy-to-manage system that removes the pain and suffering from day-to-day systems management.

For the last twelve years, the operations team at OmniTI has been managing large-scale Internet architectures that support hundreds of millions of users. We rely on integrating business-centric customer data with the data typically observed from their systems. This provides a holistic view of an architecture that enables business success.

According to Gartner, monitoring large-scale business data in real time can be a costly expense to the tune of $300,000 to $500,000 for software, with an additional 20% cost for maintenance. On top of that, the closer organizations get to real time monitoring, the more they have to upgrade their infrastructure and change business processes in order to use that data effectively. Many organizations can’t afford an implementation of that size.

Theo Schlossnagle, our CEO, says:

The open source community has responded by developing a number of tools doing different network monitoring tasks. However, they fall short in translating their monitoring and trending into business sense and this is where Reconnoiter shines. Not only do we save organizations from paying the painful price of installing and integrating multiple tools on one system, but we’re able help our clients better leverage the Internet to add value to their businesses.

You can watch a video of the OSCON presentation.

As with all open source products, the greatness of the product is built on a platform of empowered users. We encourage everyone to take part in both the use of this product as well as the ongoing development.

This unique event, generating buzz across the engineering and business worlds after only its second year, is Velocity, an O’Reilly conference held in the center of Silicon Valley, June 20-22, 2009.

Conference creators envisioned the “go-to” conference of the year, one that, in their words:

...brings together representatives from industry leaders like Google, Facebook, Microsoft…You’ll meet the people who are doing the best performance and operations work in the world.

OmniTI was happy to play a role in maintaining the momentum of this influential gathering, standing alongside giants such as Amazon, Flickr, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. We’re in our element when scalability and improving the user experience through performance are vital. Our deep involvement in the open source movement, development of large enterprise projects, and numerous foundational books authored by OmniTI staff, make us a perfect fit for Velocity.

Our CEO Theo Schlossnagle’s Scalable Internet Architectures (slides: PDF, slides: Slideshare) was the highest-rated workshop and one of the most well-received of all types of sessions.

Speaking to a packed room, Theo, author of Scalable Internet Architectures, analyzed the challenges of designing and operating web sites (both large and small) to cope with sudden and often devastating traffic conditions common on today’s turbulent Internet. He examined vulnerabilities and pinpointed both stop-gap measures and complete solutions.

As one attendee tweeted, “This is the most useful hour I’ve spent in months.” Theo is a veteran in the open source movement who regularly designs and implements scalable solutions for highly trafficked sites and companies in need of sound, scalable architectural engineering.

Over 700 people attended Velocity, including developers, engineers, technical executives, CTOs and CIOs, entrepreneurs, and academics. The conference’s web site is a rich repository of videos, resources, commentary, slides, and links to blog posts.

Significant was the overall desire from companies to intensively share experiences and collaborate in problem-solving and take fresh looks at topics such as the measurable impact of slowness (front-end and back) on user experience and retaining clients. As Theo wrote in his blog,

it focused heavily on operational strategy and and what it takes to execute tactically…The people I met at this conference were both honest and open and provided a fabulous and refreshing perspective on what today’s performance and scalability problems really are.

With such a high concentration of world-class brainpower zeroing in on topics that dramatically affect ROI, Velocity should become the conference of the year for savvy journalists and, more importantly, smart business managers.