PostgreSQL Conference East - day 2

So I'm here at PostgreSQL Conference East in College Park, MD. Didn't have time to do any blogging yesterday, so someone managed to blog about it before me... JD somehow managed to make me one of the semi-official camera-in-your-face people (photographer, if that wasn't painfully clear), so I've also been running around getting a bunch of pictures so far. They'll be up on my galleries later when I've managed to look through them a bit to remove the most crappy ones - and I'll try to get them onto the shared photo stream as well.

So far, the conference has been very good. Most talks I've been to are really high quality and interesting stuff, and the organization has worked very well (except possibly for Bruce sending Denis off to the wrong end of campus, but he made it in time for dinner so things ended up fine).

Starting at the day before yesterday, there was a "small evening event" with food and drinks at Chevys. There were quite a number of people there for being a "small" event... But it was all good and fun. JD managed to convince the staff at the place that it was David Fetters birthday, so he got both singing, icecream (I think it was) and a sombrero... During the panel today it was confirmed that his actual birthday is sometime in october, so it apparantly wasn't even close.

http://www.smugmug.com/photos/272240753_DjKS4-S.jpg alt="Josh Drake keynote" align="right" hspace="2" vspace="4" /Yesterday started with Josh Drake's keynote about the state of the community. I followed that up with a talk about PostgreSQL from Java, which was a good set of information for a total Java newbie (that's me!) Last talk before lunch was "Inside the PostgreSQL Buffer Cache" by Greg Smith. A very useful talk about measuring and tuning this very central part of PostgreSQL. I expected it to be interesting, but I'm also taking away some very direct hints on what to look at and how to interpret it that I didn't really expect.

After lunch I started with Greg Sabino Mullanes talk about the different replication options available for PostgreSQL, which also got some pretty good discussion going. Followed that up with "logic and databases", which I'll admit I spent about half of in an interesting discussion i the hallway instead. But I'm sure it was good. Finished off the day with "Postmodern PostgreSQL application development". That turned out to be mainly about ORM in Python, which honestly didn't really interest me, but I did take away some good tips about python/qt which I will obviously have to look into a bit in the future. And it did create a bit of interesting discussion with David on the way back to the hotel later.

http://www.smugmug.com/photos/272295095_razSs-S.jpg alt="EDB sponsored dinner" title="There is a story behind this situation. But that will remain between those present..." align="left" vspace="4" /After stopping by the hotel to drop off some things, it was off to the EnterpriseDB sponsored dinner and drinks party at Jasper's. Good food, decent drinks (c'mon, this is still america, you have to actually search harder to find a place with good beer options), and some good discussion with both new and "old" people. Oh, and David Fetter had a birthday again so the staff got to sing for him...

So far today we started with the panel discussion which was decent, I'd say. It could've been better, but it could also have been a lot worse. So no complaints in general. After that, we did a proper group photo (it will be available on the website as usual later, with names on it). Right now I'm in "Portable Scale-out Benchmarking for PostgreSQL" with Robert Hodges. Did a quick stop in the XML talk, but since I'm not really interested in that stuff right now, I moved on.


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

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