pgcon midtime report

So it's been a couple of days since I arrived for pgcon in Ottawa, so it's obviously time to blog. At least Devrim keeps telling me to...

Trip in was not too bad, though 4 hours at Heathrow airport is not exactly fun. Got here Monday evening, tried to coordinate with the EnterpriseDB UK team who arrived an hour or so after me. After much problems (ahem, phones that don't work abroad and such - hello Dave), we did manage to hook up and had a dinner and some beers in the evening. Plus, of course, PostgreSQL chatting!

Tuesday was mostly spent walking around the city and playing tourist along with Dave. Simon and Heikki hadn't done their homework properly, so they had to update talks and finish off patches. In the afternoon we headed over to the Royal Oak pub where the registration was, and spent the rest of the day chatting with the other pg people who had arrived.

Since I didn't go to any tutorials, the conference itself started for me on Wednesday, with Bruces keynote. Somehow I managed to get mentioned in that one again, I just don't know how that keeps happening... An interesting look back at some of the things that brought us to where we are now, and a good way to kick off the conference.

Next talk for me was PostgreSQL-IE, which is a system for doing context based image search in PostgreSQL, and looks really really interesting. Currently used in the medical field by them, but it seems like it could be used for several other things as well with fairly small changes.

After that, Robert Treat did a good overview on partitioning. I haven't really looked into the partitioning stuff as much as I've wanted, so this was a really good way to get started on that.

After lunch, I went to a presentation on migrating from SQL Server (primarily) to PostgreSQL. But I'll have to admit I spent a lot of that time working on my own slides, so I can't really comment on the talk.

Denis gave a talk on why the EnterpriseDB team picked PostgreSQL as the foundation for building the EnterpriseDB product and company. Most if the reasons were the ones you'd already have guessed, but he brought some nice details about the decision process.

Getting to the last actual talk, there was that weird PostgreSQL-on-Windows guy giving his talk. I think it was fairly well received, even though Dave had to point out I forgot to say that he had actually fixed the installer so that it'll work on Windows Vista out of the box on 8.3. Oops, sorry about that Dave! We'll see what the eval forms tell me for a more objective view on how well it went.

The final part on the actual conference was the BOF. The discussion we had first turned out into pretty much a repeat of things that were already said on the mailinglists, so I'm not sure it was very productive. We did end it up with a keysigning event, which worked better.

After that it was off to the EnterpriseDB sponsored drinks and dinner party. We got there hours after the other guys (who skipped the BOFs), but we got there before the food was served, so the damage wasn't that big. Food and beer and good discussions were had. When the place closed we moved on to the bar that's in the hotel where the EDB guys stayed for another beer, but we didn't end up staying there very long.

Just in for the start of the last day now, also worrying about the fact that my airline for my trip home have gone on strike, so I have no way to get home right now. But I'm sure it'll work out some way, so I'll just focus on the conference for now.


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Conferences

I speak at and organize conferences around Open Source in general and PostgreSQL in particular.

Upcoming

PGDay Chicago 2024
Apr 26, 2024
Chicago, USA
PGConf.DEV 2024
May 28-31, 2024
Vancouver, Canada

Past

SCaLE 2024
Mar 14-17, 2024
Pasadena, USA
Nordic PGDay 2024
Mar 12, 2024
Oslo, Norway
FOSDEM PGDay 2024
Feb 2-4, 2024
Brussels, Belgium
PGConf.EU 2023
Dec 12-15, 2023
Prague, Czechia
PGConf.NYC 2023
Oct 3-5, 2023
New York, USA
More past conferences