This past week the OmniTI Data Team was pleased to take part in two conferences in New York City, both circling around the ideas of data management.
At the PGEast Conference in Manhattan, three of OmniTI's senior staff members participated in six different sessions. Topics ranged from basic information on PostgreSQL administration and tuning, to more advanced topics for large scale operations, to pushing the envelope with new technologies like Esper, and managing databases based upon cloud infrastructure.
One such advanced talk was the tongue-in-cheek, "P90X Your Database," given by Senior DBA, Denish Patel. This session focused upon a problem common in Postgres systems handling high update volumes; dealing with wasted space from old data, often referred to as "bloat".
"One of those things that comes up regularly on the database performance tuning discussion list are clients whose performance issues relate to "bloated" tables or indexes. Most clients are struggling to identify bloated tables and indexes, and others to trim bloated tables and indexes, without locking or database outages," said Patel. "Performance gains from shrinking a bloated database is the driving factor to make databases skinnier and faster, achieving better response time."
Attendees were thrilled to find out about tools for verifying system bloat, how to pinpoint specific tables and indexes within the system that are problem points, and some advanced tools for removing bloat as an online operation. Attendees could easily relate to those problems in this lively session, asking numerous questions to understand these challenges and how to resolve them, and get advice about how to work differently to avoid the problem in the first place.
Across town, Theo Schlossnagle, Founder and CEO of OmniTI, also participated on the Master Data Wranglers panel of industry leaders at the GigaOm Big Data Conference: Structure. They discussed topics such as managing large data sets, getting real time and/or rapid response analytics from that data, and dealing with security and disaster scenarios. The mix of academic and real world perspectives proved useful for attendees; as one member of the audience put it, "This was the best panel I saw all day".
Back at PGEast, our very own Robert Treat moved from the panelist's chair and picked up the microphone, serving as moderator for the "Database in the Clouds" panel. With practitioners from VMWare, Heroku, MongoDB and others, Treat hit on a range of topics, including trending and monitoring in the clouds, performance optimization vs. architectural design for cloud based solutions, and dealing with private vs. public cloud options. "Cloud solutions are often amorphous, so it's important to try to nail down specifics when you can. You can't be afraid to ask real world questions of your providers," said Treat.
Dealing with data is one of the leading challenges for many business these days, and OmniTI is helping people push those boundaries. We're proud to be recognized for this work by both conference organizations, and look forward to helping others as these challenges continue to grow.
For more on GigaOm's Master Data Wrangler's panel, please visit GigaOM: Is Big Data Making Us Dumber?