Perl blogs will be powered by PostgreSQL

There is a grant request aiming at revamping blogs.perl.org.
I have to admit that blogs.perl.org is in a bad shape, and in fact I do not use it anymore for my personal contents since the well known
login issues.
Well, the important part about the grant request, at least with regard to the PostgreSQL community, is that…surpise! The new platform will store content on a PostgreSQL backend:

[…]
will be written on top of Dancer2,
DBIx::Class, and DBI,
with a PostgreSQL database
imported from the existing
[…]

A great news for two of my favourite Open Source projects (Perl and PostgreSQL) and a great wat to spread the word thru our own content!

PgDay.IT 2016: schedule is online!

The PgDay.IT 2016 is approaching and the schedule is available on line here. Of course it could be subject to some little changes, but it is pretty mich a complete list of what you are going to see at the tenth edition of the PostgreSQL Italian Day.

PGDay.IT 2016: there's some extra time before the CFP is out!

Ehi, the CFP for the PGDay.IT 2016 (Italian tenth edition of the PGDay) has been extended until next Saturday 22 October at 23:59 (Rome).

Don't miss the opportunity to be a speaker at one of the most well known PGDay!

PGDay.IT 2016: it's time for you to speak!

As you probably already know the Call For Papers for the PGDay.IT 2016 is now open. Please see the details here and send your contribution following the instructions. The organizing committee will review each proposal in order to deliver a great program for the tenth edition of the italian PostgreSQL based conference.

PGday.IT 2016: tenth edition of the italian PostgreSQL conference

ITPUG is proud to announce the tenth edition of the italian PostgreSQL conference, namely PGDay.IT 2016, that will take place in Prato, Tuscany, on December 13th.

The organizing committee is working to provide another great edition of the famous italian day dedicated to PostgreSQL.

Very soon the Call For Papers will start (see http://2016.pgday.it for more details).

In the meantime...stay tuned!

ITPUGLab @ PGDay.IT 2015

I had the opportunity and pleasure to play an active role in the third ITPUGLab, a well established tradition and a successful event me and my friend Gianluca proposed a few years ago.
And I have to say: it was really fun and educative.

What is the ITPUGLab? In short: it is an Open Space container entirely focused on PostgreSQL.
Attendees meet for exchanging, proposing or requesting ideas, thoughts, approaches and experiences getting 'hands-on' in a LAN environment and building a constructive shared experience on their laptops, or even philosophical discussions of any kind all being user-experience centric and related to PostgreSQl. No matter what the participants' skill level is.
There are no predefined contents: attendees come and propose or join others' proposals.

The evolution of the shared interactive contributions is what leads to discovering a path (not necessarily the right one) and get to a possible goal.

This translates to human-networking with a  PostgreSQL-social approach, allowing attendees to get acquainted in ways one cannot predict.

This year we had two and half hours dedicated to the lab, a very comfortable room and very nice people attending.

The following is the list of topics discussed end experienced:

• installation on Microsoft Windows, where the users challenged the differences on installing PostgreSQL on a Unix-unlike machine, coming to the goal of providing a running instance to other people in the room;
• migration and upgrade, with particular interest to the migration of a quite old cluster from a MS Windows machine to a mature and up-to-date cluster on a *nix machine, as well how to do it automatically and error-safely;
• install, configure and use the PostGIS extension from scratch;
• pl/pgsql scripting, with particular focus on editors, repos and best practices;
• data integrity check and validation with regard to the database and/or application;
• periodical data dump and load from one server to one (or many) others, with regard to various scenarios and possible automations.

Rules in the ITPUGLab are simple: after introducing themselves, participants start grouping spontaneously, warm up and get discussing, hands-on. Everybody can join a formed OpenSpace as well as leave it or, even, the room. When it's over, it's over: once the time elapsed pencil are down, and what happened is always the only and rightmost thing could happened.
Pictures cannot provide the excitement and fun filling the room.

As said, this is the third edition of the ITPUGLab, and quite frankly I'm proud of the continuous success it is getting within the PGDay.IT annual conference.
One thing all the three edition did have in common is the same request by attendees for more time: we are evaluating how to extend the session in the next PGDay.IT.

If you are coming to the next PGDay.IT, get into the lab: it's an experience you really don't want to miss!

PGDay.IT 2015: nine editions and counting!

We made it!
ITPUG (Italian PostgreSQL Users' Group) organized the ninth edition of the Italian PGDay, namely PGDay.IT.
We have a very strong a quite long tradition in organizing this national conference, and as in previous editions, we had a successful conference even this year.
The location, the Camera di Commercio di Prato, was simply great: a modern and really beautiful context to host the two tracks and the third edition of the ITPUGLab, the Open Space container entirely dedicated to PostgreSQL.
The keynote speech was performed by the well known community member Andres Freund, but he was not the only member of the international community.
After the keynote and the usual coffee break, with many delicious Italian pastries, the conference split in two parallel tracks where a set of very competent and efficient speakers  presented new projects, ideas, features and core implementations of our favorite database.
In the afternoon another track added to the already mentioned two giving the possibility to attendees to participate to the ITPUGLab, another well established tradition of the PGDay.IT.
Last but not least, the usual session of lightning talks, the group picture and the very good beer offered by one of the conference sponsor.

At the end we can count one hundred attendees, ten regular talks, sixteen speakers, six sponsors and two social beers.

It is quite difficult to recap in a few lines what this event was and has been in the past edition. I can only say that if you are missing this conference you are missing a very technical event within a friendly environment and fun context

PGDay.IT 2015: we are here!

The ninth edition of the Italian PGDay (PGDay.IT 2015) is really close, and ITPUG is proud to announce that the schedule is available on-line.

As in the previous editions we have a rich set of talks and contributions, as well as the third edition of the ITPUG's own Open Space named ITPUG-Lab.

Check out the official website at http://2015.pgday.it and see you soon at PGDay.IT 2015!

Thank you ITPUG

2014 was a very bad year, one I will remember forever for the things and the people I missed.

But it was also the first year I missed the PGDay.IT, but today, thank to the board of directors and volounteers, I received the shirts of the event.

This is a great thing for me, as being part of this great community.

A special thank also to the OpenERP Iitalia!

ITPUG interview

Thanks to the effort of some of our associates, we were able to perform a short interview to our associates themselves in order to see how ITPUG is working and how they feel within the association.

The results, in italian, are available here for a first brief description.

As a general trend, ITPUG is going fine, or even better of how it was going a few years before. However there is still a lot of work to do in order to spread the PostgreSQL word and to make our associates a little more involved in the community itself.

As a last word, I believe this kind of interviews should be performed on a regular basis in order to keep under control the work of the association and of its members.

Update: Feb 23
It seems that this kind of interview, and consequently the result inspection/analysys, generated a good discussion among the ITPUG members, that is I'm proud of thia other interesting result in the general management of the association. 

ITPUG's Advent Calendar

This December, borrowing a concept commonly used in other communities, I decide to challenge the ITPUG members in writing an Advent Calendar.

The idea is quite simple: write a post (related to PostgreSQL of course) per day.

We started a little late, on December 3rd, and were able to push an article almost every day so far. Posts were pushed to the ITPUG members mailing list, generating several interesting discussions among the italian community.

It is possible to find the posts at our (italian-language) planet at www.planetpostgresql.it; please note that all articles on the planet are from my blog because I did the effort to "forward" them to the planet.

I hope this would be the first of several ITPUG Advent Calendars, and I hope other PostgreSQL Users' Groups will do the same in the future.

I'd like to thank all PostgreSQL developers, translators, testers for the great product they continue to deliver us.

And I wish a Merry Christmas to you all.

Me @ Planet PostgreSQL

This is my first attempt to appear on Planet PostgreSQL.

I'm Luca, the current president of the Italian PostgreSQL Users' Group (ITPUG) and I'm a PostgreSQL addicted.

Unluckily I'm currently not using PostgreSQL in a day-by-day job, but I'm following the evolution of the project and using it wherever is possible.

I hope to able to contribute to the community somehow.