Greenplum Summit

Parallel Postgres: Community Innovation Showcase

Postgres is the world’s most popular open-source database. In this track, we’ll showcase the strength of the community with select innovations from the Greenplum ecosystem, and how they’re creating business value for some of the world’s largest and most innovative organizations.

Speakers

	Jacque Istok, Vice President Data at VMware Jacque Istok serves as Head of Data for VMware, responsible for setting data strategy and the activities for data engineering and data science. Prior, he was Field CTO helping customers architect and understand the entire VMware portfolio. A hands on technologist, he has been implementing and advising customers in architecture and back end infrastructure the majority of his career. Before VMware, Mr. Istok co-founded Professional Innovations, Inc. in 1999, a leading consulting services provider in the business intelligence and data warehousing space. Mr. Istok is on the board of several emerging startup companies and serves as their strategic technical advisor.
	Ivan Novick, Greenplum Product Lead at VMware Ivan has been working on big data, databases, and enterprise systems since 2002. He spent 5 years in the financial industry building trading systems; worked at Yahoo on the data warehouse system before Hadoop was created; hacked on a MySQL storage engine for a year and has spent the last 7 years in various capacities working on the Pivotal Greenplum product. Ivan’s passion is building next-generation data platforms. In his free time, he has also been a beginning yoga student for the last 10 years. Born and raised in NYC Ivan is now is enjoying the California lifestyle where has resided since 2006.
	Erik Brandsberg, CTO at Heimdall Data Erik Brandsberg is the CTO at Heimdall Data offering a next-generation database proxy. He specializes in application-networking technologies for web and backend data. His diverse experience at Alteon, Citrix, and Juniper Networks gave him a solid understanding of operational complexities for a modern application infrastructure.
	Taylor Vesley, Technical Lead Tanzu Greenplum on Kubernetes at VMware Taylor has a passion for systems and storage technologies. Taylor originally joined the Greenplum team as a support engineer and has since worked as a developer on the core server team with a focus on catalog, and storage, and query execution.
	Scott Kahler, Greenplum Product Management at VMware Scott Kahler has been involved in running big data architecture in the data center and in the cloud for over a decade. His success with running Hadoop and MPP infrastructure did not come without a decent amount of stumbling and learning along the way. Now a Product Manager for vmWare he's had experience as a customer, sales engineer and now on the development side of Greenplum.
	Frank Strack, CTO at Drop-In Gaming, LLC As CTO of Drop-In Gaming, he is responsible for leading the design and development of their online tournament game-play platform and, principally, finding new ways to use emerging technology to improve their users’ gaming experience. Frank brings with him over 20 years’ experience in the technology sector, primarily in roles as a principle architect for Fortune 500, 100, and 10 companies. (Try not to hold that against him.) As lifelong nerd, he spent his youth writing software and wishing he’d been born into a galaxy far enough away that he might have been taken in as a Jedi Padawan. Whatever spare time he has, he spends either with his wife and kids, riding his bike, or playing in the Seattle-based trio, The Cells.
	Ashwin Agrawal, Greenplum Tech Lead at VMware Ashwin has been developing and hacking Greenplum kernel code since 2011. Contributes patches to PostgreSQL. Before Greenplum, worked on various storage features for Network Attached Storage product for EMC. He has been working in data/IO path and enterprise systems since 2004. Ashwin has extensively worked on high availability features for different layers starting from disks, logical volumes, file systems, virtual machines to databases. Ashwin's passion is hacking on Greenplum to make it best database in world for all kinds of workloads. Born and raised in India, enjoying work and stay in California US since 2013.
	Alex Wang, Member of Technical Staff 3 at VMware Alex is a developer of the Greenplum database since 2017. She works in many areas of the database kernel, including query optimizer, query executor, storage, WAL replication, performance testing, etc. She has worked on merging Postgres releases into the Greenplum database. She has also been working on developing a column store for upstream Postgres and is passionate about building high performance databases for various workloads. Born and raised in China, went to grad school in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, she loves all sorts of dancing and outdoor activities.

Code of conduct

VMware is dedicated to providing and promoting a safe and inclusive environment for everyone, regardless of gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, ethnicity, nationality, race, age, religion, or other protected categories. Because we don’t always know what might make someone else feel uncomfortable or unwelcome, these guidelines are meant to reinforce our values and clarify our expectations of all of those who participate in our community and events. They also define unacceptable behavior and provide instructions on what you can do if you see unacceptable behavior.

We each have different backgrounds and experiences. At VMware, we have three core values that we expect all to abide by: do the right thing, do what works, and be kind.

Expected behavior

1. Be considerate, respectful, and collaborative.
2. Refrain from using any demeaning, discriminatory, or harassing behavior and speech.

Unacceptable behavior

Unacceptable behavior may include, but is not limited to, the following:

1. Harassment and discrimination, which includes: any verbal, physical, or visual conduct based on sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, transgender status, race, age, national origin, disability, or other protected characteristics; inappropriate use of nudity and/or sexual images in public spaces (including presentation slides); deliberate intimidation, stalking, or following; harassing photography or recording; sustained disruption of sessions, talks, or other events; and inappropriate physical contact, or any unwelcome sexual attention.
2. Using any boisterous, lewd, or offensive behavior or language; using sexually explicit or offensive language or conduct; using profanity, obscene gestures, or racial, religious, homophobic, transphobic, or ethnic slurs; commenting about a person’s body or sexual activity; and discussing sexual activity.
3. Failing to obey any of the rules or regulations of the event or instructions of the event staff.
4. Participating in any other illegal activity not already covered above.

Consequences of unacceptable behavior

We won’t tolerate unacceptable behavior. If a participant engages in unacceptable behavior, the event organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from the event without warning or refund and, if appropriate, involving local law enforcement. Anyone asked to stop unacceptable behavior is expected to comply immediately.

How to report unacceptable behavior

If you have a complaint or concern about harassment, discrimination, bullying, or any other conduct that violates the VMware Events Code of Conduct, please contact [email protected].

We thank our attendees in advance for your help in keeping the event welcoming, respectful, and friendly to all participants.