I got back from OpenSource Days in Copenhagen yesterday, after two and a half fairly intense days. As usual (while up until last year the conference was named LinuxForum, it's still the same conference) the conference itself was great. Lots of very good talks to listen to, and very nice arrangements for us speakers. And a whole lot of interesting people to talk to.
It was the first time I've been both manning a "commericial booth" (for Redpill Linpro) and been a speaker/participant at the same time. I think it worked reasonably well - though my booth colleagues might think differently due to my absence from the booth particularly on the Saturday. In my talk, I specifically tried to avoid mixing in our company services (unlike some other speakers, who shall remain nameless..), because I was there to talk about PostgreSQL. I think that also worked out fairly well.
My own talk went pretty well - got some interesting discussion going afterwards, along with a couple of suggestions for making it better next time. It's nice with an audience that's involved enough to come with those. There are no speaker eval forms at the conference, but I got the impression it was fairly well received.
As a result of the talk, which had a section about how to use pgcrypto to build a secure authentication system, several people asked me what can be done about getting pgcrypto out of contrib, to make it "safer" to use this in a production application. Given the number of people who mentioned it, it's pretty clear to me that we need to do something about this.
Speaking of things that were mentioned a lot - several people asked me during the conference about the state of the CTE-patch for PostgreSQL 8.4. Unfortunately I couldn't say much more than "probably" at the time. Since then, Tom Lane has committed the patch. So for those of you who asked then, and don't follow the list - the answer has now changed from "probably" to "yes".
Obviously, I listened to Jan's keynote talk about Slony. While i did not learn anything new about Slony, Jan did a very good job of explaining some of the more advanced things Slony is capable of doing, which is the reason it's fairly complex to configure. Good talk!
I'd also like to second what Troels writes in his blog - Jan did a good job of not hiding the weaknesses with Slony. Which is something that non-open(source) vendors have a tendency not to be. (And I'll venture as far as to say that there were certainly other speakers at this conference who were not so forthcoming - hopefully myself excluded, but I'll leave it to others to judge that)
I'll certainly be back next year!
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