Magnus Hagander's PostgreSQL blog

Initial numbers from our registration database for PGDay.EU 2010 is showing that we are expanding our international reach more than last year. In 2009, 60% of the attendees were from France, which is where the conference was held. This year the number of attendees from Germany is "down" to about 50%, meaning we have more people from other countries. The total number of countries is down one though - we have no registration from Nicaragua this year! Even our attendance from the US is up to three more people.

Pardon my horrible openoffice.org chart, but here is the current spread of attendees. Where does your country stack up? If it's not Germany, then it's not high enough - time to suggest/encourage/force/trick your friends and colleagues to register and attend! (And if it's Germany - hey, can you really let the French get to 60% last year and not beat them this year?)

Registration for PGDay.EU 2010 closes soon! Don't miss out on the biggest PostgreSQL event in Europe this year, and all the great presentations!

PGDay Europe 2010 is drawing closer - only two weeks until kickoff! Some of the training is filled up, but we still have space for some more people on the general conference (and some of the training sessions). It's not too late - go register!

I'll be spending much of the time working with the conference administration, hopefully making things flow. But with a schedule like this, there are some sessions that I'm definitely not going to miss:

• The keynote, of course. Simon Phipps is a well known and very experienced Open Source speaker and worker. He'll be talking about "Back to the Future of Open Source", and it will be very interesting to hear his perspective on this, having been on the inside of for example Sun.
• Play chess against PostgreSQL (and get beaten) with Gianni Colli. You just need to read the title, of course I have to see it Unfortunately it's up against PgOpenCL, but that's what happens when you have so many good talks.
• I think I can skip out of Simon Riggs talk about replication - I need to have my class for Wednesday ready before this anyway. But I highly recommend it to anybody who is planning to deploy the 9.0 replication features.
• That afternoon I'll be busy with the conference, and won't get to go to any of the talks... I'll definitely miss the Concurrency talk, the clustering and the psycopg one.
• Tuesday, I can't quite decide between Developing PostgreSQL performance or Graph Constraints, and Why You Care. But we put two such great talks early in the morning to make sure everybody gets up!
• Next I'd go to Stefans talk about benchmarking, but it's in German, so I think I'm better off not doing that. It'll be the case-study of the large deployment that Bull did for the French social services instead.
• Before lunch, I think it'll be Postgres-XC. I've been to a lot of conferences now where Mason has held a talk about this, and never actually managed to see one...
• After lunch, I'm again stuck at doing work (sheesh). If you haven't seen it already, I recommend Bruce's MVCC talk. There are other good ones as well, of course, but Bruce does a very good "deep introduction" to PostgreSQL's implementation of MVCC.
• Obviously there's no skipping out on the closing keynote. Ed usually does a good job - I expect no less this time.

With this much great content, it's hard to choose - but those are my choices for PGDay. (I of course reserve the right to change my mind, depending on how late the speaker left from the party the day before)

What are yours?

And if you haven't registered yet, you still have a few more days. Don't miss your chance to attend the biggest PostgreSQL event in Europe this year! Registering is easy and quick - not to mention cheap!

Today is the first day of PG-West, also known as JDCon-west. After having about a week off to visit places and visit friends, I'm now back up in San Francisco for this conference, which will cover most of this week. It's a bigger conference than JDCon has been before - in most measures. It as more sessions than ever before - but you have to wonder who thought it was a good idea to have five parallel sessions. That's almost a guarantee that there will be more than one session you really want to go do. I'd rather have seen it in fewer tracks and spread over more time.

It's also bigger in attendees than before. Last I heard it was at 203 or something like that - just over 200. That means that for the first time, JDCon is actually larger than a PGDay.EU (that had just over 190 last year) - I'm sure being in a great location in central San Francisco helps with that, along with the fact that the economy is in a better place now than a year ago. We're still in the lead over time (we were well over 200 a couple of years back), but we're also both well beaten by the Brazilians. It' sets a good target for us to work towards!

The set of sessions looks really good, but as usual the hallway track is the one where much of the really good things happen. I missed this mornings tutorial sessions completely due to very interesting discussions outside. Hopefully the slides and notes and/or video will be available to look over once we're done. If you're tracking this from away, the twitter stream has some interesting comments - and will hopefully have more!

Speaking of conferences - if you haven't already, now's a good time to register for pgday.eu. Particularly if you are planning to attend one of the training sessions - at least one of the sessions is already more than half sold out!

It's finally time - we've opened up for registrations for PGDay Europe 2010.

We are not finished with the schedule yet, so if you are looking for a specific talk, you'll have to wait a while longer. Work is in progress though - we've already notified some of our speakers that they are approved. However, if you submitted a talk and have not heard from us yet, it's not yet time to panic. The reason we haven't published a schedule yet is that we're working on ways to include more talks!

So why would you want to go register now, even though the schedule isn't posted yet? Well, first of all, the schedule is looking like it'll be at least as good as last year. We have several well known good speakers from the community showing up again, and also some fresh faces with interesting topics!

But more importantly, this year, we've added training for the first time. Training will run on the wednesday (the main conference being monday and tuesday). This training is *limited availability* (25 seats per session), and *extra cost*. You pay this at registration. And the seats are handed out on a first come/first serve basis. So if you want to attend the training, now is the time to register! The training schedule *is* final, so be sure not to pick two training sessions that run at the same time.

The conference this year will be held at the Millennium Hotel in Stuttgart. We do recommend that you reserve a room with that hotel, as we have a group rate there, and it's conveniently located (hint: no need to go outside to get from A to B). But using this hotel is not mandatory - you can book your room anywhere you like. However, it should be noted that *wireless internet* is only included if you booked a room *using our group rate*. If you don't, you can pre-purchase the access when you register, or you can solve it yourself for example using 3G data. We will *not* have the ability to provide or sell you wireless access unless you pre-purchase it!

With all that said, head off and register!

PGDay.EU 2010 has finally been announced. It will be in Stuttgart, Germany, on December 6th to 8th. More details available on the conference website.

We have also sent out our call for papers. If you have done something interesting with PostgreSQL, please go ahead and submit a talk! We are currently looking for talks in both English and German!

(public service announcement further down!)

I'm starting to get ready for the most mis-named conference so far this year. I mean, seriously. It's called East 2010, and yet it's located approximately 6000 km (that's almost 4000 miles for you Americans) to the west of the prime meridian. That's not even close. Sure, it's to the east of where the West conference is usually held, but really, this reminds me of POSIX timezones...

This will be a somewhat different conference than previous PostgreSQL conferences. It's the first big commercial conference. This has enabled it to change venue from "local university or college where rooms are cheap or free" to a conference hotel in downtown Philadelphia. Whether this is actually good for the talks is yet to be seen, but it's likely going to make some things around the conference easier and more integrated. There will also be a exhibition area - something we have tried for pgday.eu without much interest, but it will hopefully be more successful in this surrounding.

The contents of the conference are also somewhat different, since there is now a clear focus also on "decision makers", something that many PostgreSQL conferences have been lacking in. We may all want it to be true that the decision makers are the people who are actually going to use the product, but we know that's not true. This gives a conference schedule that contains a broader range of talks than we're used to - this can only be good.

Myself, I will be giving an updated version of my security talk, focusing on authentication and SSL. The updates are mainly around the new and changed authentication methods in 9.0, and some minor updates on the SSL part. If you've seen it before it may be an interesting refresher, but you might be better off going to see Greg Smith's benchmarking talk if you haven't...

Now for the second part, which is the public service announcement...

If you're like me, you find the official schedule for East very hard to read and basically useless to get an overview. It's also horrible to use from a device like the iPhone, something I'm quite likely to use at the conference. But we solved this problem for the PostgreSQL Europe conferences, and that code is pretty simple. So some copy/paste of a couple of hundred lines of python, some glue code, and voilà, a much more (IMHO) readable schedule. As a bonus, it also generates an aggregate iCalendar feed, that you can plug directly into the calendar application on the iPhone (or I assume most other phones). Google calendar may be very nice to use to work on the schedule, but I find this a lot more user friendly for those reading it - particularly in the ability to get an overview.

The page and the feed will both update once per hour by pulling from the official calendar feeds. They will also adjust for the fact that all the official feeds are 3 hours off due to the calendars being set in the wrong timezone. So should they suddenly jump 3 hours that's because the official ones were fixed - just remind me and I'll take out the adjustment. Anybody is free to use them, but of course, usual disclaimers apply, double check with the official one, etc, etc, etc.

shots.

If you're interested in the code for the aggregator itself, it's up on my github page. And of course, any patches for cool features or just making it look better are always appreciated - it's open source after all.

Yesterday was the first meeting for the FOSS STHLM "group" - a (very) loose group of FOSS interested people in the Stockholm region. We met in a lecture hall at the Stockholm University in Kista north of Stockholm, for a couple of hours of short presentations. The lineup was very nice: cool embedded stuff? yup, rockbox. General linux? Yup, upstart. Debian-specific? Of course. OpenSource Sweden? yeah. Curl? What else did you expect with Daniel as one of the organizers? PostgreSQL? Yeah, why else would I be blogging this?

Our allocated time was short, so the setup was many short talks. It actually worked a lot better than I thought it would, but it's still very hard to convey something useful in just 20 minutes.

I had a hard time figuring out what I should focus on, so I did a split into two parts (perfect strategy - if you have too little time to do one thing good, do two things in the same time instead...). I started with a section about "things to think about if you're switching to PostgreSQL or trying it out for the first time" - things like the very most basic config parameters that you always have to touch. And of course the classic - "ident authentication failed" issue that hits everybody on RedHat or Debian platforms at least (which is most of the users - definitely in this crowd). It's hard to do much in 12 minutes, hopefully it got some people interested.

I followed that with a very very very short version of "what's coming up in 9.0". Once again, I focused on one of my personal favorite features, which is Exclusion Constraints. While this is often listed as one of the cool things in 9.0, sometimes I feel that too much focus is on streaming replication and hot standby. Don't get me wrong, these are very good and very much needed features. But Exclusion Constraints is a real eye-opener. All databases (including PostgreSQL, of course) have replication - this is "just another way to do it". Yes, a very important and good way to do it, but it's still not something brand new. Exclusion Constraints is something that's fundamentally new. And it's a brilliant example of how PostgreSQL is moving the goalposts forward. Oh, and it's really useful and cool, of course! (and it'll be even better when we have the period datatype, or something similar, in 9.1!)

In summary, I think it was a great event. Big thanks to all those who helped make it happen! Hopefully we can follow it up with many more in similar ways - perhaps mixing these many-short-talks with some more focused discussions on specific areas or technologies. Time will tell...

*Update*: For those who asked, there were somewhere around 150 people in the sessions.

I forgot completely to close up the feedback system for our talks at FOSDEM and post the feedback to the speakers. My apologies to all speakers and others who were interested! Thankfully, Marc Balmer reminded me today and the individual ratings for different speakers have been sent off to them.

When it comes to the aggregated statistics, they look fairly similar to what we saw at PGDay. The number of speakers were much lower, and unfortunately so were the number of people giving feedback. But in the end, the results were fairly clear. I am especially happy with the level of knowledge in the speakers we attract. Let's start with the graphs:

Breaking down the details, I think this shows a great quality of our speakers:

And the level of their knowledge is even higher:

Even at the bottom of this list, the numbers are very good! Unfortunately, the fairly low number of votes give a high deviation at the bottom of the chart.

For next time, we'd really like to get more people to leave their feedback. Does anybody have a good idea on how to make that happen?

A while back I submitted a couple of talks for PG-East 2010 in Philly, and over the past couple of weeks I've been nagging the organizers semi-frequently to get some pre-info on whether I've been accepted or not, since flight prices started to climb fairly rapidly. The site clearly says information that the information will be available on Feb 15th, so I can't really complain that the answer kept being "don't know yet".

A couple of days ago, I got a note from Dave pinged me with a message asking if I was approved. Turns out this press-release had been posted (by his company, no less). Which explicitly names me as a speaker at the conference.

Took me two more days of chasing down JD, but I now have confirmation I'll be there. I don't actually know what I'll be speaking about, but it's a pretty safe bet it will be PostgreSQL related.

I call this Time management by press releases. If I could only get it to apply to all meetings, I would no longer need to keep my own calendar up to date.

So, I'll see you in Philly!

I've finally had the time to summarize the feedback we received from pgday.eu.

We received feedback from about 35 people, which is obviously way less than we were hoping for. Ideas for how to improve this for next time are very welcome! This also means that the figures we have are not very exact - but they should give a general hint about what our attendees thought.

I just sent out the individual session feedback summaries to each individual speaker. These will not be published - it's of course fine for each speaker to publish his own feedback if he wants to, but the conference organizers will not publish the detailed per-session data.

The statistics we do have show that most of our speakers did a very good job, and that the attendees were in general very happy with the sessions. We have also received a fairly large amount of comments - both to the conference and the speakers - which will help us improve specific points for next year!

I'll show a couple of graphs here with the total across all sessions and speakers. In these graphs, 5 is the highest score and 1 is the lowest.

The attendees also seemed to be very happy with our speakers, which is something I'm very happy to hear about. It's also good to see that almost nobody felt the speakers didn't know very well what they were talking about - always a worry with a conference that has so many experienced community people attending.

Actually trying to figure out which speaker is best using this data is very difficult. But here's a list of the top speakers based on speaker quality, who had more than 5 ratings on their talks. The list includes all speakers with an average score of at least 3.5. There are a lot more hovering around that line, but there has to be a cutoff somewhere... Again note that there are still not that many ratings to consider, so values are pretty unstable. I've included the standard deviation as well to make sure this is visible.

All of these are clearly very good numbers.

So once again, a big thanks to our speakers for their good work. And also a very big thanks to those who did fill out the session feedback forms - your input is very valuable!

Update: Yes, these graphs were made with a python script calling the Google Charts API. Does anybody know of a native python library that will generate goodlooking charts without having to call a remote web service?