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Nordic PGDay 2014 - wrap-up of the wrap-up

Nordic PGDay 2014 was just over a week ago in Stockholm, Sweden, and was definitely a success. A lot more people than we initially expected had the event sell out completely a couple of weeks before it happened. A week later we've now collected the feedback forms that people filled out (a big thanks to the 25-30 people who did fill them out - a 30% "hit rate" on feedback forms gives us a pretty good input).

I'll lead with a few graphs that fairly well represents the feedback:

In particular, that every person who filled out our feedback would recommend the event to friends or colleagues is definitely a flattering grade!

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Nordic PGDay 2014 - come join us up north!

It's been discussed for several years, so I'm very happy to finally be able to announce that next year, there will be a Nordic PGDay, in Stockholm, Sweden, on March 20th. It will follow a pattern that is common to those of you that have already visited other PostgreSQL event - a combination of great talks from PostgreSQL insiders, and a hallway track to meet and talk with other PostgreSQL people. As this is our first instance in the Nordics, it will be a single-track single-day event, but we hope to grow it in the future.

Our main target audience is in the Nordics, and we hope to see a lot of visitors not just from Sweden but also from our neighboring countries. Since this means the official language of the conference will be English, we will of course also welcome both visitors and speakers from the rest of Europe and the world as well!

We have not yet opened our call for papers, but plan to do so shortly. We have also not opened registration yet, as we do not know exactly what the entrance cost will be yet. This will be depending on how many sponsors we can sign up for the event - which we have also not opened up for yet (a pattern is emerging here). But the date and venue is set, so mark your calendars and start moving other events around so you can be sure to make it...

If your company is interested in sponsoring the event, please let us know at sponsors@nordicpgday.org, and we'll be sure to send you our sponsorship information as soon as it's available!

For the rest of you, keep up with our website or follow us on Twitter for updates!

See you in Stockholm in March next year!

FOSS STHML #1

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.

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