This week, March 22-25, the PostgreSQL community (with guest appearances by MongoDB advocates & users) came to NYC for PG East 2011. At the beginning of the week I wasn’t sure how to manage my jealousy of those headed to GigaOm’s Structure Big Data (which, by the way, is at the same time and 5x more expensive), but I didn’t think twice about it while meeting and learning from members of the PG community. The days were a mix of talks and sharing war stories in the hallways, and the evenings included happy hours with the NY Postgres Users Group (if you’re in NYC, join!) and Paperless Post.

I gave a talk that briefly addresses what an ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) is and how they are great for application development, but can be a headache for DBAs. Most of the talk focuses on key factors to consider in evaluating an ORM and in maintaining and scaling systems that use ORMs. The intended audience for the talk is:

• DBAs curious if ORMs might actually be the devil
• Startups or development shops without a data expert on hand
• Lone DBAs or small DBA teams that are seriously outnumbered by developers using ORMs
• Developers who want to understand more about ensuring applications create usable data
• Developers using ORMs who think the database might be a performance bottleneck

Obviously the slides are never quite the same as a live talk, but I tried to make them somewhat independently valuable: