Magnus Hagander's PostgreSQL blog

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 These will not be published - it's of course fine for each speaker to publish his own feedback if he wants to, but the conference organizers will not publish the detailed per-session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?

I've finally gotten around to uploading my pictures from PGDay.EU 2009 to my smugmug gallery.

Clearly the conference was tiring, and we all needed a rest... (yes, this was during JD's talk)

And as the picture says, don't forget to submit your feedback - the site is still open for that!

I'm currently sitting on my flight home from Paris CDG, after a couple of very hectic days. It's going to be a couple of days (which in reality is going to drag out into a couple of weeks due to other work engagements and then travel for the JPUG conference) before it'll be possible to completely evaluate the conference and things around it, but here's what I have so far.

I'm going to leave the evaluation of the talks themselves to somebody else. There were many others of the "regular PostgreSQL bloggers" present at the conference and we've already seen some posts around it. Hopefully there will be more, both in French and English. If you are blogging about this and your blog isn't already up on Planet PostgreSQL, please consider adding it so that the community at large gets notification of your posts.

So, day one is almost finished, when it comes to the conference itself - and then it's off to the EnterpriseDB evening party. A quick summary of the day is: *awesome*.

Going into a little more detail, the day started with us actually getting up painfully early. Got to ParisTech in the morning, right as they opened up our room. I have to say the facilities at ParisTech have been great - the rooms are in great shape, perfect size, and all the A/V equipment is working perfectly. (Yes, there is a slight flicker on one of the projectors, but it's not bad).

I did the intro section with Jean-Paul, and there's really not much to say about that. We (well, I) forgot to add a slide about the feedback - oops. I bet that's one reason we don't have as much feedback entered yet as we'd like.

Simon took over with a keynote, which was very good. Simon is a very good speaker, and he found a good balance between technical and non-technical talks. It was a nice way to kick off the conference. At this time, we had somewhere between 125-150 people had shown up, which is definitely not bad.

I half-followed the English track after that, with talks about PostGIS and Data Warehousing, which were both very good talks. Also spent some time in the organization, which has really worked pretty smoothly. We've had a few minor issues, but they were all solved quickly.

Lunch was *fantastic*. Many thanks to our great caterers who served us an amazing lunch, with good organization, and more than enough food. Couldn't be better!

Watched Gavin's talk on scalability after lunch, which is always a good one. After that I had my own talk which went at least Ok, though I did finish a bit early. After that it was off to a pgadmin developer meeting, which is where I am now.

So I'd better go now, so I don't miss out on the activities.

Yesterday we announced the schedule for PGDay.EU 2009. The Friday will have one track in English and one in French, and the Saturday will have *two* tracks in English and one in French. There are a lot of good talks scheduled - I wish I could trust my French enough to go see a couple of those as well...

We are also now open for registration. The cost of the conference is from €60 for a full price two day entry with discounts for single-day and for students. See the registration page for details. While we expect to be able to accommodate all interested people, if we are unable to do so those that register first will obviously be the ones we can take. We also prefer that you register as soon as you can if you know you're coming, since that makes our planning much easier.

Just a quick note to let people know I have uploaded my photos from pgcon. They're not as many as last year, and not really good, but there are at least some for people to look at

I have only started tagging up names. If you know more of them, just drop me an email with photo link and name. Thanks!

I'm currently sitting in Frankfurt Airport waiting for my connecting flight back home to Stockholm, and I figure this is a good time to sum up the rest pgcon that ended a couple of days ago.

The second day of talks, Friday, began with what must almost be called a developer keynote. PGDG "giants" Tom Land and Bruce Momjian gave a talk on how to get your patch accepted into PostgreSQL. I think they did a good job of showing some of the general thoughts that are behind this process in a good way. And it was fun to finally get to see Tom do a talk at one of these conferences...

After this I split a slot between the Wisconsin Courts talk and Selenas VACUUM talk, since I had to take a phonecall in the middle of the talk. Why does this always happen? Thus, didn't see enough of either talk to really make any comments..

After lunch I did the temporal data talk, but I admit to not following it too closely - not really something I was deeply interested in, but this was really the only time when there wasn't a talk in any of the tracks that really interested me.

In the last of the regular talks, I went to Gavin's talk about Golconde. Sounds like a very interesting piece of technology. I don't actually have any use-case for it at this time, but I'm sure I will come across them eventually - and at least now I know how to pronounce it (which I hear Gavin's colleagues are having some issues with)

The last scheduled slot was the lightning talks. This year they were not scheduled up against any regular talk - good move by the schedulers (I was on the program committee, but didn't help out with the scheduling, so I can take no credit myself). Several very interesting and a couple of fun talks, and some that did both. The award for best lightning talk this year has to go to Josh Tolley and his talk on How to not review a patch (Josh: you get no link since your endpoint blog seems to not support author links?!)

Writing up this reminds me: I have yet to review several of these talks on the pgcon website. If you were there and haven't done so yet - please do it now! Most speakers really appreciate the feedback - I know I certainly do. It's what helps us be better next year! It will also help the program committee pick which talks are most interesting for next year.

I skipped out on the tourism-in-ottawa tour by Dan since I've done that the previous years, and instead took a train up to Montreal with Greg Stark, Dave Page, Selena Deckelmann and Bruce Momjian. Greg gave us a nice tour of that city instead (where he's originally from). And it was certainly thorough - there's this one roundabout that we did at least 3 laps in... Obviously we failed to completely stop talking about PostgreSQL, but at least that wasn't the main focus.

Left Montreal Sunday evening and arrived back in Europe Monday morning, and am now just waiting for the connecting flight to do the last leg back to Stockholm, and back to the regular work.

Talks track

excellent

Hallway track

excellent

Bar track

excellent

Shawarma track

good

$(other) track

excellent

If you didn't go to pgcon this year, this is a good time to start thinking about going next! And don't forget pgday.eu in Paris this November!

We're now up to the third day of pgcon, the first one of the actual conference - the previous ones being dedicated to tutorials. The day started with Selena, me and Dave doing a semi-improvised keynote. Well, it started with Dan saying welcome and going through some details, but he doesn't count... I doubt we actually spread any knowledge with that talk, but at least we got to plug some interesting talks at the conference, and show pictures of elephants.

Missed the start of the Aster talk on Petabyte databases using standard PostgreSQL, but the parts I caught sounded very interesting. I'm especially excited to hear they are planning to contribute a whole set of very interesting features back to core PostgreSQL. This makes a lot of sense since they're building their scaling on standard PostgreSQL and not a heavily modified one like some other players in the area, and it's very nice to see that they are realizing this.

After this talk, it was time for my own talk on PostgreSQL Encryption. I had a hard time deciding the split between pgcrypto and SSL when I made the talk, but I think it came out fairly well. Had a number of very good questions at the end, so clearly some people were interested. Perhaps even Bruce managed to learn something...

After this we had lunch, and I'm now sitting in Greg Smiths talk about benchmarking hardware. This is some very low level stuff compared to what you usually see around database benchmarking, but since this is what sits underneath the database, it's important stuff. And very interesting.

The rest of the day has a lineup of some very nice talks, I think. So there'll be no sitting around in the hallway! And in the evening there is the EnterpriseDB party, of course!

Yesterday had the developer meeting, where a bunch (~20) of the most active developers that are here in Ottawa sat down together for the whole day to discuss topics around the next version of PostgreSQL, and how our development model works. Got some very important discussions started, and actually managed to get agreement on a couple of issues that have previously been going in circles. All in all, a very useful day.

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!

That's it - FOSDEM is over for this year. I'm sitting at the airport waiting for my flight home, which should be boarding in about an hour.

I'd say this year was at least as good as last year. The general idea was the same - we had a booth where we sold merchandise and answered questions, and a devroom where we had a full track of talks. We sold slightly less than last year, mainly because we sold almost no t-shirts at all. We ran out of the blue elephants (as usual) and the mugs long before the conference was over. We had a lot of visitors to the booth, so I think we have to declare it a big success. And a great job by all our volunteers who spend the time there instead of browsing what else the conference had to offer. An extra kudos to Gevik who remembered to buy and bring snacks for all the booth people!

The devroom was much larger than last year, which was very good - on the saturday, we filled the room for almost every talk, and there is no way we could've put that many people in the room we had last year. The downside was that it was at the very other end of the conference area, so it was a pretty long walk from the booth (and from the main area of FOSDEM) to the devroom. I think this actually reduced the number of "spontaneous" people we got in there, so if t was closer we would've had even more.

We also had a major FAIL in that the projector didn't work. This was fixed fairly quickly by the FOSDEM staff (thanks!) with a mobile projector, but it left us with a very awkward keynote since we were late and not really ready. We also had a projector with too little light for the room, so we had to have the blinds down all day making the room dark and making it hard to open the windows for ventilation. but in the grand scheme of things, those are trivial issues!

The talk track was very good. My personal favorite (and I know I'm not alone in this) was Simon Riggs talk on replication. Simon's a very good speaker, and the topic is highly interesting. I also liked Heikkis talk about FSM and Visibility Map and Selenas usergroups talk. Well, I realliy liked all talks, but if I have to choose... I think the talk track this year was a clear step up from last year. Even though Greg Stark forgot one of his talks and didn't show up until it was time to take questions.. (sorry, Greg, but you're not getting away with that unpublished)

As for the social track - well, I have yet to be to a PostgreSQL conference (and I consider "our part of FOSDEM" to be a PostgreSQL conference) that did not have a good one, and this was certainly no exception. Great people to hang out with, good food, and good beer - what more can one ask for?

A big thanks to everybody who helped out with tihs conference - both the PostgreSQL specific parts, and the big thing! Already looking forward to coming back next year!