Viewing entries tagged with talk. Return to full view.

PGConf.EU 2014 - feedback is in

It's that time of the year again - we've wrapped PGConf.EU 2014, and I've just closed the feedback system, so it's time to take a look at what's been said.

We're keeping fairly consistent numbers with previous years, which is something we are definitely happy with. We did have a slight drop in "overall view", since this year we had 8% ranking us as 3, a worse score than we saw last year, and we had a couple of fewer people voting 5. And a slight shift from 5 to 4 on the programme. The numbers are still good of course, but since we had a tiny drop last year as well, we need to step our game back up for next year!

This year we had a slightly bigger spread of how users identify themselves, seeing most categories chip away a little on DBAs and Developers, but they are still definitely the dominating categories. We also have a lot of returning developers - it's cool to see so many people who have been to every one of our events so far, combined with a full 25% being first-time attendees!

Continue reading

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.

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.

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