PDXPUG May 13 Tracking Database and Query Performance Data

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2026 Wednesday May 13th Meeting 6:30pm to 8:30pm

Please note the new meeting location! We’re in downtown this month

Location: Portland State University Engineering Building (1930 SW 4th Ave Portland OR 97201)

https://maps.app.goo.gl/AzoJNF2snLKELRJa7

Speaker: Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman

Tracking database performance

We are going to look at a new performance tracking dashboard with Kellyn. She is going to take us though tracking database performance all the way down to the query level. This talk is for all levels, so don’t be shy, and bring your questions.

Kellyn joins us from Redgate where she works in engineering. She has been a prolific public speaker at events like PASS (Professsional Association of SQL Server) and SQL Saturday. Her back ground covers Oracle, SQL Server, Azure, and of course, our beloved Postgres as well. Kellyn is also involved with PDX Women In Tech as well, and has been a speaker on community, inclusion, and DEI.

When you get there, text or call the number on the sign to be let in.

PDXPUG April 17 Deep Dive into B-Trees

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2026 Friday April 17th Meeting 6:30pm to 8:30pm

Please note the new meeting location! We’re in downtown this month

Location: Portland State University Engineering Building (1930 SW 4th Ave Portland OR 97201)

https://maps.app.goo.gl/AzoJNF2snLKELRJa7

Speaker: Mustafa Akur

Deep dive into B Trees

B-trees are the primary data structures for database indexing, and for good reason. In this session, we will examine why they are ubiquitous and remain the preferred choice for database workloads.

Mustafa Akur is a PhD student in Biomedical Engineering at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). His research focuses on developing AI models to improve the prognosis of prostate cancer. Prior to his doctoral studies, he worked on audio signal processing, acoustic recognition, and query engine plan optimization, specifically targeting streaming workloads.

When you get there, text or call the number on the sign to be let in.

PDXPUG March 19 Data Lake Architecture and Data Warehouse Trends

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2026 Thursday March 19th Meeting 6:30pm to 8:30pm

Please note the new meeting location. And please RSVP on MeetUp as space is limited.

Location: Multnomah Arts Center – The front desk can guide you to the meeting room.

7688 SW CAPITOL HWY • PORTLAND, OR  97219

Speaker: Grant Holly

Data warehouses, data marts, data lakes, data swamps, data graveyards? I know. I’m confused too. Data lakes are increasingly common and pose many new challenges and opportunities. I’m going to overview some contemporary design patterns and hopefully shed some light on this popular architecture.

We’ll start with a fly-over of recent data warehousing history and core concepts. Then we will look at some popular catalogs and storage formats as well as covering OLAP engines for unlocking potential from data lakes.

Whether you are a grizzled veteran with PB of data, or you’re building your first reporting database, this talk is for you. We don’t take ourselves (too) seriously. Come and hang out, network, ask questions, share stories, and take it all in.

PDXPUG February 19th, 2026: What’s New in PostgreSQL 18

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2026 Thursday February 19th Meeting 6:30pm:8:30pm

Please note the new meeting location. And please RSVP on MeetUp as space is limited.

Location: Multnomah Arts Center – The front desk can guide you to the meeting room.

7688 SW CAPITOL HWY • PORTLAND, OR  97219

Speaker: Mark Wong

PostgreSQL 18 was released September 25, 2025.

We will review freely available presentations available on the internet.

Come learn what’s new, share experiences, or just meet with local peers! Casual, informal.

https://www.meetup.com/pdxpug/events/312977438/

PDXPUG Sept 4th: OSS Database Spotlight Clickhouse

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Thursday Sept. 4th 6:30pm

Location: American Red Cross

3131 N Vancouver Ave · Portland, OR

Speaker: Robert Hodges

Cheap, Fast, Scalable: Introducing Analytics with Open Source ClickHouse®

Real-time analytic databases are indispensable tools for quick insights on large datasets, and ClickHouse currently leads the pack in speed and usage. This talk shows the major features that make ClickHouse popular for real-time analytics and provides a jumping off point to build your own apps. We’ll explain internals of ClickHouse and provide explicit guidance on when to reach for it. (And when not to.;) We will also demo new work from Altinity that adds separable compute and storage using shared Apache Iceberg tables. We’ll include thoughts on design patterns for using PostgreSQL and ClickHouse productively together. 

We are so excited to host Robert and have him introduce another open source database Clickhouse. Robert has been working on databases since 1982, from pre-relational systems through modern analytic DBMS, with a focus on distributed systems and transaction processing He has worked principally with open source databases since 2006 and Kubernetes since 2018. His day job is running Altinity, a ClickHouse vendor.

Looking forward to seeing you all there.

FOSSY 2025 Conference at Portland State University

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July 31st – Aug 3rd

Portland State University @ Smith Memorial Student Union building

This year Mark and I, with Richard Yen and Gabrielle Roth’s help, have been organizing the database track for the FOSSY conference. The conference focuses on open source software which makes the Postgres a perfect fit. We have put together a track of speakers in a range of topics spanning AI workloads, observability, community diversity, data ethics, and of course there are some Postgres-specific talks as well.

The conference has additional interesting tracks as well. You can check out all the details here: https://2025.fossy.us/ FOSSY 2025 starts July 31st through Aug 3rd. If you are keen on the database track, mark your calendar for Friday Aug 1st. There’s a keynote at 9:45 and the first database talks start at 10:45. Here’s a link to the full schedule

I am very pleased with the variety of talks we selected, and am looking forward to it. Hopefully I will see you there.

PDXPUG February 20th: OAuth Support in PostgreSQL

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2025 Thursday February 20th Meeting 6:30pm:8:30pm

Location: American Red Cross

3131 N Vancouver Ave · Portland, OR

Speaker: Jacob Champion

We are going to have Jacob walk us through recent work on implementing OAuth support in Postgres.

Postgres has a wide array of supported authentication methods. The strongest methods have trouble scaling across large numbers of database instances, though, and while organizations have ways to centralize user credentials — for example by using LDAP or Kerberos — those solutions come with their own large lists of caveats. Jacob is currently developing Postgres-native support for OAuth, which is a widely-deployed framework for authorizing clients using a third-party provider. I’ll talk about the current state of the patchset, explain some of the elements of the design, and demonstrate what it might look like to deploy it yourself.

Now a bit about Jacob. Jacob Champion is a software developer at EDB and a contributor to PostgreSQL. He enjoys working on network security, protocol design, and authentication systems.

https://www.meetup.com/pdxpug/events/305777417/

PDXPUG October 24th: Pgbouncer for the Masses

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2024 Thursday October 24th Meeting 6:30pm:8:30pm

Location: American Red Cross

3131 N Vancouver Ave · Portland, OR

Speaker: Grant Holly

Pgbouncer is a popular tool for Postgres users at any scale. Over the years, it has become the go-to database proxy for Postgres. You’ll likely find pgbouncer at the heart of all kinds of production workloads. Recently, there have been some pretty exciting releases adding new exciting features for things like prepared statements.

In this talk we are going to take a look at how to get started with pgbouncer. We will introduce the concept of a database proxy, then we will go into the details of connection pooling, configuration, high availability, and using pgbouncer to scale Postgres connections.

If you’ve never used pgbouncer before, this talk is for you! If you have used pgbouncer for years, this talk is also for you too!

Now a bit about me. I’m Grant. My name is part of the SQL language. I’ve been leading the Portland Postgres user group for a long time now along with Mark Wong. I’ve been working with Postgres in production since version 9.2, and conference speaker on Postgres.

PDXPUG August 22nd: Benchmarking with Benchbase

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2024 Thursday August 22nd Meeting 6:30pm:8:30pm

Location: American Red Cross

3131 N Vancouver Ave · Portland, OR

Speaker: Paul Jungwirth

Benchmarking is an important part of developing database systems like Postgres. For businesses, benchmarking can guide important decisions around selecting a database management system, or evaluate configuration changes. However, while there are many standard benchmarks out there, setting up, configuring, running, and collecting results was left as an exercise to the reader.

Benchbase is an open-source benchmarking framework from Carnegie Melon University’s Database Group (https://github.com/cmu-db/benchbase). It helps you configure, run, and collect results from various standard benchmarks. It also provides a framework for authoring your own performance benchmarks, and wiring it up to the batteries-included configuration, running, and results collection provided by it.

Paul is going to walk us through Benchbase, and some recent work he has embarked on around creating a benchmark. If you are a veteran of benchmarking, or have never done a benchmark before, this talk is for everyone.

Now a bit about Paul. He’s a freelance software developer here in Portland, and has been building applications with Postgres since 2011. You can check out his work here (https://github.com/pjungwir/benchbase). Paul has been working on the Postgres project itself. He’s authored many database extensions, and his contributions to Postgres include work on GiST indexes, multiranges, and SQL:2011 application-time features.