It's been a couple of days since I got back from Prague and the local PostgreSQL Developer Day held there last week. The conference itself was on Thursday, and I arrived Wednesday evening. David Fetter had already arrived directly from FOSDEM in Brussels, but I had to go home and do some actual work in between. I met up with the group in the restaurant/bar at the bottom floor of our hotel - which happens to be an old brewery.
The conference itself started with a quick welcome from the conference organizers, and then I delivered an even shorter version of my What's new in PostgreSQL 8.4 talk from FOSDEM as the keynote. This was followed by Kristo Kaiv talking about PostgreSQL at Skype - happily enough for me (and David I assume) in English.
After Kristo, I gave a repeat of my Deploying PostgreSQL in a Windows Enterprise talk. It's a hard talk to give to an audience like this - it's pretty clear that the large majority were users of Linux/BSD/Solaris and didn't care much for windows. On the other hand, I noticed several people who were very interested in the integration aspects, so I think it was fairly successful anyway.
This was followed by a number of talks in Czech, which I will freely admit to not understanding much more than scattered words like "fsm_pages", "recovery" and so on. Simon Riggs arrived during these talks, and gave his Replication, Replication, Replication talk (the same talk he gave at FOSDEM with some minor modifications/additions). After this there was a nother couple of czech talks, and some interesting hallway discussions.
After the conference, the organizers held an auction of the blue elephants (small size - David brought three from FOSDEM) and a couple of the stressballs. Amazingly, they brought in about €60 for one of the elephants (€25 being the base price) and an impressive €15 for a stressball (sure, signed by me and David Fetter, but the base price for that one is €1..). Finally they put a nice bottle of wine in the hands of each speaker as a speaker gift - unfortunately I wasn't able to bring mine home on the plane due to liquid regulations for traveling without checked luggage.
In the evening, we met back at the same restaurant for dinner and beer. After dinner, the Czechoslovakian PostgreSQL user group was formally formed! Clearly this process was also in Czech, so I can't comment much on that - other than it's good to see the user group formally formed!
That concludes the conferences in February for me, unless something unexpected come up. Thanks to all the people involved in organizing these conferences, the social activities around them, and generally in making sure a good time was had!
"Czechoslovakian"? Both Czech Republic and Slovakia?
Yes, it both Czech Republic and Slovakia, thus the name.
We just established preparation committee for official registration process and election preparation and so on.
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Sounds like a great time! I'm glad Simon was able to give his talk again.
Is Zdenek leading the new user group? I'd love to link to them on the pugs site.
-selena