Since June, as part of my work for PGX, I’ve been doing on-site full-time consulting for iovation here in Portland. iovation is in the business of deterring online fraud via device identification and reputation. Given the nature of that business, a whole lot of data arrives every day, and I’ve been developing PostgreSQL-based solutions to help get a handle on it. The work has been truly engaging, and a whole hell of a lot of fun. And there are some really great, very smart people at iovation, whom I very much like and respect.

So much so, in fact, that I decided to accept their offer of a full time position as “Senior Data Architect.” I started on Monday.

I know, crazy, right? They’ve actually been talking me up about it for a long time. In our initial contact close to two years ago, as I sought to land them as a PGX client, they told me they wanted to hire someone, and was I interested. I said “no.” I said “no” through four months of contracting this summer and fall, until one day last month I said to myself, “wait, why don’t I want this job?” I had been on automatic, habitually insisting I wasn’t interested in a W2 position. And with good reason. Aside from 15 months as CTO at values of n (during which time I worked relatively independently anyway), I’ve been an independent consultant since I founded Kineticode in November of 2001. Yeah. Ten Years.

Don’t get me wrong, those ten years have been great! Not only have I been able to support myself doing the things I love—and learned a ton in the process—but I’ve managed to write a lot of great code. Hell, I will be continuing as an associate with PGX, though with greatly reduced responsibilities. And someday I may go indy again. But in the meantime, the challenges, opportunities, and culture at iovation are just too good to pass up. I’m loving the work I’m doing there, and expect to learn a lot over the next few years.

So what, you might ask, does this mean for Kineticode, the company I founded to offer support, consulting, and training services for Bricolage CMS? The truth is that Kineticode has only a few technical support customers left; virtually all of my work for the last two years has been through PGX. So I’ve decided to shut Kineticode down. I’m shifting the Bricolage tech support offerings over to PGX and having Kineticode’s customers move there as their contacts come up for renewal. They can expect the same great service as always. Better even, as there are 10 associates in PGX, and, lately, only me at Kineticode. Since Kineticode itself is losing its Raison d’être, it’s going away.

I intend to remain involved in the various open-source projects I work on. I still function as the benevolent dictator of Bricolage CMS, though other folks have stepped up their involvement quite a lot in the last few years. And I expect to keep improving [PGXN] and DesignScene as time allows (I’ve actually been putting some effort into both in the last few weeks; watch for PGXN and Lunar/Theory announcements in the coming weeks and months!). And, in fact, I expect that a fair amount of the work I do at iovation will lead to blog posts, conference presentations, and more open-source code.

This is going to be a blast. Interested in a front-row seat? Follow me on Twitter.

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PGX had a client come to us recently with a rather nasty deadlock issue. It took far longer than we would have liked to figure out the issue, and once we did, they were able to clear it up by dropping an unnecessary index. Still, it shouldn’t have been happening to begin with. Joel Jacobson admirably explained the issue on pgsql-hackers (and don’t miss the screencast).

Some might consider it a bug in PostgreSQL, but the truth is that PostgreSQL can obtain stronger than necessary locks. Such locks cause some operations to block unnecessarily and some other operations to deadlock, especially when foreign keys are used in a busy database. And really, who doesn’t use FKs in their busy database?

Fortunately, Simon Riggs proposed a solution. And it’s a good one. So good that PGX is partnering with Glue Finance and Command Prompt as founding sponsors on a new FOSSExperts project to actually get it done. Álvaro Herrera is doing the actual hacking on the project, and has already blogged about it here and here.

If you use foreign key constraints (and you should!) and you have a high transaction load on your database (or expect to soon!), this matters to you. In fact, if you use ActiveRecord with Rails, there might even be a special place in your heart for this issue, says Mina Naguib. We’d really like to get this done in time for the PostgreSQL 9.1 release. But it will only happen if the project can be funded.

Yes, that’s right, as with PGXN, this is community project for which we’re raising funds from the community to get it done. I think that more and more work could be done this way, as various interested parties contribute small amounts to collectively fund improvements to the benefit of us all. So can you help out? Hit the FOSSExperts project page for all the project details, and to make your contribution.

Help us help the community to make PostgreSQL better than ever!

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A bit of good news: In addition to my ongoing Kineticode work doing Bricolage consulting services, training, and support, I have a new gig! I, along with Josh Berkus, David Fetter, Andrew Dunstan, and a team of other PostgreSQL experts, have started a new company: PostgreSQL Experts, Inc. I’m really excited about PGX, a cooperative of solid and experienced–dare I say expert?–people dedicated to providing exceptional PostgreSQL professional services, including consulting, training, and support.

Moreover, we have a solid group of experienced application developers, who are ready and willing to build your PostgreSQL-backed applications on Rails, Catalyst, PHP, or whatever environment you prefer. If it’s related to PostgreSQL, it’s what we do.

So get in touch or meet us at PGCon (we’re sponsoring!) or at OSCON 2009. I’m really excited about our company, and looking forward to growing it as PostgreSQL adoption grows.

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