NyPHP user group meeting: Postgresql Plus

I know it's been a while since I posted NYPHP news. I actually missed a couple of meetings. My crazy schedule got in the way. I was quite excited about this particular meeting. Bruce Momjian (http://momjian.us/) was the guest speaker of the evening. The topic was PostgreSQL Plus (http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/postgres_plus.do). Before I get into the meeting let me backtrack a little.

About 5+ years ago I was working on various projects and was quite happy. One day I was asked to help out another group in my department. They were a little shorthanded and pressed for time. I was glad to help out and my boss didn't mind. So when I was told what the project was all about and was given some things to start with I found out that it's PHP and PostgreSQL. At that time I heard of PHP. I was also a bit surprised to see them pick PostgreSQL over MySQL. I mean everybody knows about the LAMP stack. But a project is a project and it needs to get done. This is how I started coding PHP. One interesting point was that PostgreSQL was quite superior in functionality back then and I think it was able to do more than what MySQL still can't do. But that's a topic of another discussion.

About 1-2 months ago I heard of something called EnterpriseDB (http://www.enterprisedb.com) and started looking into it. I also saw that they were building a product based on PostgreSQL. I was also quite curious since it's been a few years ever since I used the product. Since then a number of major releases came out. So my point was to see how far the product has gotten since the time I used it and if they managed to resolve some of the problems that I ran into years ago.

I was prepared and excited to talk to one of the people on the inside and to hear him explain what he and the team have been up to. It was also a nice opportunity to ask technical questions and a lot of people did. I would say that it was a nice turnout and the crowd was very technical. Most of the people are also Oracle users since most of the questions were in relation to Oracle or comparison of architecture and functionality. I do have to say that even though this was not a PHP focused presentation it's one of my favorite so far. It was very educational and informative. I learned and heard many great things that I can follow up on my own and see where that takes me.

Among the attendees I was actually pleasantly surprised to see Chris Shiflett (http://shiflett.org/) and OmniTI (http://omniti.com/) team show up as well. Which in my mind is a first time I see them showing up. Another great thing was meeting up with till (http://merged.till.klampaeckel.de/) who is visiting from Germany. till is one of the core developers behind roundcube (http://roundcube.net/) webmail application. We actually chatted on irc some time back. He also wrote an article for PHP Magazine (http://www.phparch.com) on roundcube.

A couple of resourceful links on the topic:
1. Slides have been posted online and are available here: PosgreSQL Plus (http://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/pgplus.pdf).
2. PHP PostgreSQL documentation (http://us.php.net/manual/en/book.pgsql.php).

P.S. I also won a PHP & MySQL (http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-MySQL-Apache/dp/067232976X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214446656&sr=8-1) book. The way such things go is that people drop their business cards into a bag and they pick out a business card at random. Let's just say that I was quite surprised to get my name called out as I don't usually win anything (esp at random or by chance).

Gena01

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