Magnus Hagander's PostgreSQL blog (Entries tagged as conferences)

New committers to PostgreSQL

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Sun, 26 May 2013 16:13:14 +0000

During the closing session of PGCon this year, the core team announced the addition of four new committers to PostgreSQL:

Jeff Davis
Stephen Frost
Fujii Masao
Noah Misch

These have all been involved in both writing new code for PostgreSQL and reviewing other peoples patches during the latest couple of development cycles. With this addition, we will increase the capacity to handle the rising number of contributions we get, and get even more features into the upcoming versions of PostgreSQL.

Welcome to the team!

PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2013 - dates and location

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:17:00 +0000

Finally we're ready with phase 1 of the planning of PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2013.

PGConf.EU 2013 will be held on Oct 29-Nov 1, in at the Conrad Hotel in downtown Dublin, Ireland.

The format will be the same as previous years - one day of training before the main event consisting of three days fully packed with sessions about PostgreSQL.

We are hard at work to get our sponsorship campaign ready and intend to launch it within April. Also we are working on the call for papers and opening the registrations. So, please stay tuned and think about possible talk submissions!

So for now - mark your calendars, and start planning your trip! Follow the RSS feed from the website or our twitter feed for updates as soon as we know more details!

We look forward to seeing you this autumn on the Emerald Isle.

PGConf.EU 2012 - what about next year

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:45:00 +0000

In our conference feedback, we also asked for a number of things that are designed to help us decide what to do next year. The most obvious one, of course, being where the conference should be next year.

Without even reading the texts behind the truncated texts, it's obvious that this didn't help us very much. The only city that scored higher than the average was Vienna - and it's likely not a coincidence that this is the option that's geographically closest to Prague, so it's the closest one for most of our attendees. In general we have to declare this as a draw - all suggested cities seem to be equally popular. So no direct guidance from there. While we have nothing to announce yet, we have already started considering locations for next year - but it won't be announced until we know something for certain.

Continue reading "PGConf.EU 2012 - what about next year"

PGConf.eu 2012 - evaluation and summary

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 16:12:00 +0000

It's been a bit longer than last time, but the time has come for a blog post that sums up the feedback we received for this years pgconf.eu in Prague. Let's start out with the overall impressions:

We've actually managed to improve the over all impression slightly - last year had 51% giving us a rating of 5, and this year we got 57%. Event more important, we've kept the rate of people who are giving a score of 3 or lower at less than 1%. According to the numbers, the programme quality was slightly worse than last year - down to 65% giving it a rating of 5, vs 71% last year. We still have 97% giving 4 or 5 - up from 95% last year (well within the margin of error).

All in all, I think we can safely say "job well done" to all the people who worked on the conference - thanks for all your efforts!

Continue reading "PGConf.eu 2012 - evaluation and summary"

PGConf.EU 2012 - schedule is up! Early bird ends in less than a week!

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 14:30:00 +0000

We've finally finished the schedule for PGConf.EU 2012 in Prague in October, and put it up at http://2012.pgconf.eu/schedule/. Of course, a schedule is never truly finished - we will update it if necessary as we get closer to the conference. But the basics are there.

Our Opening Keynote this year will be delivered by industry veteran Joe Celko, who will give us an interesting look at the past and the future of SQL and other database technologies. And if you read and enjoyed the SQL for Smarties book from Joe, you have a chance to attend a full day of training with him as well! Limited number of seats available, so register quickly!

Other than Joe, we have many great talks from well known speakers in the PostgreSQL community such as Simon Riggs, Bruce Momjian, Josh Berkus, Dimitri Fontaine and Devrim Gunduz, as well as a number of new speakers with exciting stories to tell! There is more than enough content for everybody!

Early Bird registration for the conference ends this Friday. This is your last chance to register at the reduced price, after which the full price will be charged.

We hope to see you all in Prague this October!

PostgreSQL Conference Europe Trainings announced and Registration open

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 20:11:00 +0000

PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2012 in Prague, The Czech Republic, on October 23-26 is now accepting registrations for conference attendance at http://2012.pgconf.eu/registration/.

The Early Bird special price will be available until September 7th, but that's no reason not to get your registration in early! Should you for some reason want to register for just a part of the conference, single day rates are also available at this time.

We have also announced our training schedule at http://2012.pgconf.eu/training/. Take your chance to attend training on the day before the conference, held by major PostgreSQL community contributors like Bruce Momjian, Simon Riggs and Greg Smith, and relational database veteran Joe Celko. Local PostgreSQL experts Tomas Vondra and Pavel Stehule will also give training in Czech. These trainings have a limited number of seats available, so register early to ensure there is one for you!

And don't forget - the call for papers is still open! If you have already submitted a talk, or are planning to submit one, we suggest you wait to register until you have received a confirmation if the talk was accepted or not. The early bird rate will be available long enough for you to register after you have received this notification - and if your talk is accepted, attendance is of course free!

As usual, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us at contact@pgconf.eu.

Call for Papers - PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2012

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:49:00 +0000

The call for papers for PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2012 in Prague, the Czech Republic has now been posted. As usual, we are looking for talks on all topics related to PostgreSQL. At this point, we are looking for submissions for regular conference sessions - we will post a separate call for papers for lightning talks at a later time.

We are also still looking for sponsors - please see our website for details about the sponsor benefits and the costs.

Follow the news feed on our site, or our Twitter feed, for news updates!

PGConf.EU 2012 - announcement and call for sponsors

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:59:00 +0000

It's time to mark your calendars - PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2012 will be held at the Corinthia Hotel in Prague, the Czech Republic, on October 23-26 2012. As previous years there will be one day of professional training (Tuesday 23rd) and then three days of regular talks.

At this point, we are also opening our sponsorship program. We are looking for sponsors at all levels, from Bronze to Platinum. Please see our website for details about the sponsor benefits and the costs.

Follow the news feed on our site, or our Twitter feed, for further information as we finalize details.

PGConf.EU 2011 - the speakers and the presentations

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 16:36:00 +0000

This part of the feedback is almost turning into a repost year from year. But it's a good thing to be reposting if any, so I'm doing it anyway. To start with, just take a look at these graphs:

Those are pretty fantastic ratings. A full 84% rated the content quality as 4 or 5, and only 1% rated it as less than 3. That basically comes down to there being no talks of bad quality. This confirms the feeling that we had when we tried to pick out the talks for this year - the number of great submissions where just huge. We had to reject around half the talks submitted, and there were only a few of those that we rejected because we thought they weren't very good. Most were simply rejected because we didn't have the time and space to accept them all.

The ratings people have given our speakers confirm what we have always thought to be one of the reasons people like the conference - and many other PostgreSQL conferences as well: you get to listen to and talk to the people who really know what they are talking about. Often because they are the very people who wrote the software in question. A whole 96% of all the ratings gave our speakers a score of 4 or 5 for their knowledge of the topic. And nobody scored lower than 3. These truly are the experts you get to meet!

Most of our speakers also scored very high on the Speaker Quality metric. Our top speakers this year were:

Speaker	Rating	Vote count	Standard deviation
Bruce Momjian	4.8	31	0.4
Ram Mohan	4.7	36	0.5
Selena Deckelmann	4.7	38	0.5
Magnus Hagander	4.6	52	0.6
Simon Riggs	4.6	43	0.6
Stephen Frost	4.6	18	0.5
Peter van Hardenberg	4.5	11	0.7
Gavin M. Roy	4.5	10	0.5
Greg Smith	4.5	68	0.7
Harald Armin Massa	4.4	10	0.5
Steve Singer	4.4	10	0.7
Gianni Ciolli	4.4	32	0.8
Dave Page	4.3	25	0.8
Heikki Linnakangas	4.3	12	0.9
Ed Boyajian	4.2	13	1.0
Marc Balmer	4.1	12	0.7
Dimitri Fontaine	4	11	0.8

This really is the reason why people come to the conference, and keep coming back the next year - our outstanding speakers! Thank you all for showing up this year to give your presentations, and we hope to see you again next year!

That concludes the posts I'm going to make about pgconf.eu feedback this year. Some of you have already asked about next year, and I'm not going to post any information about the feedback we got there - yet. We are reviewing the feedback we received, and are soon going to start looking for a good venue for next year. We have made the mistake before of announcing a location before we had a venue secured, and we're not going to do that again. We are going to announce it as soon as we know, but that will not be until we have actually decided on an exact venue. But we are absolutely planning to do it again next year, and sometime around the same time of the year. Exactly where we don't know yet...

PGConf.EU 2011 - the feedback is in

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 09:53:00 +0000

Almost exactly a week later than what we said, I have finally closed down the feedback system for PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2011. I think we all needed slightly more time than we expected to recover and catch up properly...

The detailed feedback for each speaker will be sent out during the day today, unless we run into any unforeseen technical issues, and I will try to summarize the conference-wide feedback here. If any particular note that you posted is not referred here, don't worry - we read them all, but there are far too many of them to post here.

Starting with the conference organization itself and it's venue, I'm really happy to see that we have managed to deliver something that the majority of our attendees really like:

Not a single vote less than 4, on a scale of 1-5, for the overall impression. And only one below 4 for the programme. I can only say a huge thanks to the big group of volunteers who ran this conference, and made it what it was. Clearly you did a good job!

Continue reading "PGConf.EU 2011 - the feedback is in"

pgconf.eu schedule & keynote announced

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:57:00 +0000

A little bit later than we hoped, we have now finally published the schedule for pgconf.eu. Three days full of presentations to choose from - and of course also the always popular lightning talk sessions. The schedule listed now is what we consider the final version, but we obviously reserve the right to make last-minute modifications both to which talks are included and exactly when they are scheduled, if necessary.

Keynote speaker

We are also happy to announce that the conference keynote will be presented by by Ram Mohan, CTO of Afilias, who will be talking about how Afailias has built their company on open source solutions, and how this has turned into a great success. Afilias as a company has been deeply involved with PostgreSQL for a long time, including employing former Core Team member Jan Wieck and leading the development of the Slony replication system.

pgconf.eu training announced, call for papers deadline extended

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 20:45:00 +0000

Training

We are happy to announce that our training schedule is now available at http://2011.pgconf.eu/training/. These trainings are full or half day sessions on the day before the regular conference sessions, and come at an extra cost. The available trainings are:

Performance From Start to Crash by Greg Smith, 2ndQuadrant
Mastering PostgreSQL Administration by Bruce Momjian, EnterpriseDB
Building business applications for Cloud with Servoy by Robert Ivens, ROCLASI
Slony, a still useful replication tool by Guillaume Lelarge, Dalibo

Seats are limited at these trainings, so we advise you to book as soon as possible. Training is booked as additional options on the standard conference registration form.

Call for papers

Since we are still in vacation period for a lot of people, we have decided to extend the deadline for our call for papers. The new deadline for submitting talks is midnight, Sep 2nd.

We will, however, start approving talks that have already been submitted as soon as possible, and announce them as soon as we have decided. That means that if you want to be sure that we will have time to review your talk, you should submit as soon as possible!

Full call for paper details are available on the site.

Get your talks in for pgconf.eu 2011

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 14:13:00 +0000

The call for papers for PGConf.EU 2011 in Amsterdam will close at the end of this week. Now is the time to get your talk submissions in!

We are interested in all kinds of talks - from deep technical ones, to novice oriented advise and case studies of interesting things done with PostgreSQL. We expect a wide range of different skillsets amongst our visitors, so we want a good spread of the talk topics as well!

Of course, all speakers get free entrance to the conference on all days (training sessions not included).

If you have any questions for us, don't hesitate to contact us.

So, there is nothing to wait for. Head over to the call for papers site and submit your ideas! And please help us spread the word to potential speakers in other communities as well, who may not have seen our posts yet!

PGConf.EU open for registration!

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 21:23:00 +0000

PostgreSQL Conference Europe is now accepting registrations for conference attendance.

The Early Bird special price will be available until September 5th, but that's no reason not to get your registration in early! Should you for some reason want to register for just a part of the conference, single day rates are also available at this time.

If you are planning to attend one of our training sessions, the schedule has not yet been published for that, and it is therefor not yet possible to register for trainings. However, do not worry: the early bird rate will be available for all attendees who register for the trainings - all the way until right before the conference.

And don't forget - the call for papers is still open! If you have already submitted a talk, or are planning to submit one, we suggest you wait to register until you have received a confirmation on if the talk was accepted or not. The early bird rate will be available long enough for you to register after you have received this notification - and if your talk is accepted, attendance is of course free!

As usual, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us.

Call for papers - PGConf.EU 2011

nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) — Mon, 30 May 2011 07:49:00 +0000

PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2011 will be held on Ocober 18-21 in the Casa 400 Hotel in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It will cover topics for PostgreSQL users, developers and contributors, as well as decision and policy makers. For more information about the conference, please see the website at http://2011.pgconf.eu/.

We are now accepting proposals for talks. Please note that we are looking for talks in English, Dutch, German and French.

Each session will last 45 minutes, and may be on any topic related to PostgreSQL. Suggested topic areas include:

Developing applications for PostgreSQL
Administering large scale PostgreSQL installations
Case studies and/or success stories of PostgreSQL deployments
PostgreSQL tools and utilities
PostgreSQL hacking
Community & user groups
Tuning the server
Migrating from other systems
Scaling/replication
Benchmarking & hardware
PostgreSQL related products

Of course, we're happy to receive proposals for talks on other PostgreSQL related topics as well.

We also have a limited number of longer, 90-minute, slots available. Please indicate clearly in your submission if you wish to make a 90-minute talk.

Finally, there will be a session of five minute lightning talks. A separate call for proposals will be made for them further on.

The submission deadline is August 21st, 2011. Selected speakers will be notified before Sep 5th, 2011.

Please submit your proposals by going to http://2011.pgconf.eu/callforpapers and following the instructions.

If your proposal is in a non-english language, please include a single-sentence description of the presentation in English as well in the field for submission notes.

The proposals will be considered by committee who will produce a schedule to be published nearer the conference date. If your proposal has been accepted, you will be informed by email within two weeks of the submission deadline.

This call for papers is also available on the web at http://2011.pgconf.eu/callforpapers

We look forward to hearing from you, and seeing you in Amsterdam in October!