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.