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pgcon photos

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!

pgcon is done

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.

So, the short version of the pgcon summary:
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!

pgcon, 1st talk day

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.

Getting started at pgcon

I arrived in Ottawa on Sunday evening after a pretty long flight over from Stockholm. Completely by random I met Josh Berkus at Chicago O'Hare, and it turned out we were on the same flight to Ottawa. Had a nice dinner with Josh and Dan Langille, the PgCon organizer, at an Indian place.

Monday morning, met up with Selena, Dan and Josh again for breakfast close to our hotel. And somehow we got suckered into doing the keynote on thursday. Actually, I think it went down this way: Josh volunteered Selena to do it. Selena volunteered me to do it. And I volunteered Dave. In the end we'll end up doing it together - and of course Dan will do the general conference introduction. We haven't really gotten started on the actual talk itself, so if you have good ideas for it, feel free to let us know...

Not much time go to be spent on the slides yesterday, as me and Selena a some kind of mini web-hackathon. We spent time working on some features for Planet PostgreSQL. Some cleanup took a bit longer than expected so they're not actually out yet, but they will be soon... I see Selena thinks we're going to deploy it to the production server today, but I'm very doubtful about that. We'll see.

Last night was really when a lot of known people started turning up, first for dinner at Works Burger and then for beer a the Royal Oak. The big news from the Oak was that Stephen didn't fall asleep this year. Other than that, things were pretty much as usual.

Today has been spent mostly working on slides for my regular talk. I skipped out on both Stephen Frost's tutorial on access control and Josh's updated version of performance whack-a-mole - my dedicated slide-making time will go to the keynote, so I have to finish the slides now.

Rumor has it Dave has now arrived in Ottawa and should show up soon. So keynote work (at the Oak) will probably start shortly.

Tomorrow's second tutorial day, but for me and many of the most active backend hackers that are here, it's a day of meeting up with other developers and discuss what's going to happen in PostgreSQL for the next year or so. It was a great success last year, and I'm sure everybody is expecting an equally valuable as last year. And the appropriate thanks out to Dave and EnterpriseDB for arranging the meetup and picking up the tab.

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