Using PostgreSQL in City Government

Local governments deliver important services to residents, businesses, and visitors: Water, sewer, roads, land use, police, fire, environmental compliance, are some of services that cities routinely provide. Garden Grove, a full service city of over 172,000 residents in Orange County has taken advantage of Open Source since 1995. PostgreSQL increasingly helps solve the City’s business needs. The talk will cover how cities generate lots of varied and interesting data and outline how PostgreSQL is used in Garden Grove developed Ruby on Rails applications as well as a number of commercially available applications. Ruby on Rails tends to treat databases as “bit buckets” but the framework can be easily integrate many of Postgres’ powerful features if handled correctly. City developed applications include police records management, utility billing, and parks and recreation management.