PGConf.EU 2012 - announcement and call for sponsors
It's time to mark your calendars - PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2012 will be held at the Corinthia Hotel in Prague, the Czech Republic, on October 23-26 2012. As previous years there will be one day of professional training (Tuesday 23rd) and then three days of regular talks.
At this point, we are also opening our sponsorship program. We are looking for sponsors at all levels, from Bronze to Platinum. Please see our website for details about the sponsor benefits and the costs.
Follow the news feed on our site, or our Twitter feed, for further information as we finalize details.
PGConf.EU 2011 - the speakers and the presentations
This part of the feedback is almost turning into a repost year from year. But it's a good thing to be reposting if any, so I'm doing it anyway. To start with, just take a look at these graphs:
Those are pretty fantastic ratings. A full 84%25 rated the content quality as 4 or 5, and only 1%25 rated it as less than 3. That basically comes down to there being no talks of bad quality. This confirms the feeling that we had when we tried to pick out the talks for this year - the number of great submissions where just huge. We had to reject around half the talks submitted, and there were only a few of those that we rejected because we thought they weren't very good. Most were simply rejected because we didn't have the time and space to accept them all.
The ratings people have given our speakers confirm what we have always thought to be one of the reasons people like the conference - and many other PostgreSQL conferences as well: you get to listen to and talk to the people who really know what they are talking about. Often because they are the very people who wrote the software in question. A whole 96%25 of all the ratings gave our speakers a score of 4 or 5 for their knowledge of the topic. And nobody scored lower than 3. These truly are the experts you get to meet!
Most of our speakers also scored very high on the Speaker Quality metric. Our top speakers this year were:
| Speaker | Rating | Vote count | Standard deviation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bruce Momjian | 4.8 | 31 | 0.4 |
| Ram Mohan | 4.7 | 36 | 0.5 |
| Selena Deckelmann | 4.7 | 38 | 0.5 |
| Magnus Hagander | 4.6 | 52 | 0.6 |
| Simon Riggs | 4.6 | 43 | 0.6 |
| Stephen Frost | 4.6 | 18 | 0.5 |
| Peter van Hardenberg | 4.5 | 11 | 0.7 |
| Gavin M. Roy | 4.5 | 10 | 0.5 |
| Greg Smith | 4.5 | 68 | 0.7 |
| Harald Armin Massa | 4.4 | 10 | 0.5 |
| Steve Singer | 4.4 | 10 | 0.7 |
| Gianni Ciolli | 4.4 | 32 | 0.8 |
| Dave Page | 4.3 | 25 | 0.8 |
| Heikki Linnakangas | 4.3 | 12 | 0.9 |
| Ed Boyajian | 4.2 | 13 | 1.0 |
| Marc Balmer | 4.1 | 12 | 0.7 |
| Dimitri Fontaine | 4 | 11 | 0.8 |
This really is the reason why people come to the conference, and keep coming back the next year - our outstanding speakers! Thank you all for showing up this year to give your presentations, and we hope to see you again next year!
That concludes the posts I'm going to make about pgconf.eu feedback this year. Some of you have already asked about next year, and I'm not going to post any information about the feedback we got there - yet. We are reviewing the feedback we received, and are soon going to start looking for a good venue for next year. We have made the mistake before of announcing a location before we had a venue secured, and we're not going to do that again. We are going to announce it as soon as we know, but that will not be until we have actually decided on an exact venue. But we are absolutely planning to do it again next year, and sometime around the same time of the year. Exactly where we don't know yet...
PGConf.EU 2011 - the feedback is in
Almost exactly a week later than what we said, I have finally closed down the feedback system for PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2011. I think we all needed slightly more time than we expected to recover and catch up properly...
The detailed feedback for each speaker will be sent out during the day today, unless we run into any unforeseen technical issues, and I will try to summarize the conference-wide feedback here. If any particular note that you posted is not referred here, don't worry - we read them all, but there are far too many of them to post here.
Starting with the conference organization itself and it's venue, I'm really happy to see that we have managed to deliver something that the majority of our attendees really like:
Not a single vote less than 4, on a scale of 1-5, for the overall impression. And only one below 4 for the programme. I can only say a huge thanks to the big group of volunteers who ran this conference, and made it what it was. Clearly you did a good job!
pgconf.eu schedule & keynote announced
A little bit later than we hoped, we have now finally published the schedule for pgconf.eu. Three days full of presentations to choose from - and of course also the always popular lightning talk sessions. The schedule listed now is what we consider the final version, but we obviously reserve the right to make last-minute modifications both to which talks are included and exactly when they are scheduled, if necessary.
Keynote speaker We are also happy to announce that the conference keynote will be presented by by Ram Mohan, CTO of Afilias, who will be talking about how Afailias has built their company on open source solutions, and how this has turned into a great success. Afilias as a company has been deeply involved with PostgreSQL for a long time, including employing former Core Team member Jan Wieck and leading the development of the Slony replication system.
pgconf.eu training announced, call for papers deadline extended
Training
We are happy to announce that our training schedule is now available at http://2011.pgconf.eu/training/. These trainings are full or half day sessions on the day before the regular conference sessions, and come at an extra cost. The available trainings are:
- Performance From Start to Crash by Greg Smith, 2ndQuadrant
- Mastering PostgreSQL Administration by Bruce Momjian, EnterpriseDB
- Building business applications for Cloud with Servoy by Robert Ivens, ROCLASI
- Slony, a still useful replication tool by Guillaume Lelarge, Dalibo
Seats are limited at these trainings, so we advise you to book as soon as possible. Training is booked as additional options on the standard conference registration form.
Call for papers
Since we are still in vacation period for a lot of people, we have decided to extend the deadline for our call for papers. The new deadline for submitting talks is midnight, Sep 2nd.
We will, however, start approving talks that have already been submitted as soon as possible, and announce them as soon as we have decided. That means that if you want to be sure that we will have time to review your talk, you should submit as soon as possible!
Full call for paper details are available on the site.
Get your talks in for pgconf.eu 2011
The call for papers for PGConf.EU 2011 in Amsterdam will close at the end of this week. Now is the time to get your talk submissions in!
We are interested in all kinds of talks - from deep technical ones, to novice oriented advise and case studies of interesting things done with PostgreSQL. We expect a wide range of different skillsets amongst our visitors, so we want a good spread of the talk topics as well!
Of course, all speakers get free entrance to the conference on all days (training sessions not included).
If you have any questions for us, don't hesitate to contact us.
So, there is nothing to wait for. Head over to the call for papers site and submit your ideas! And please help us spread the word to potential speakers in other communities as well, who may not have seen our posts yet!
PGConf.EU open for registration!
PostgreSQL Conference Europe is now accepting registrations for conference attendance.
The Early Bird special price will be available until September 5th, but that's no reason not to get your registration in early! Should you for some reason want to register for just a part of the conference, single day rates are also available at this time.
If you are planning to attend one of our training sessions, the schedule has not yet been published for that, and it is therefor not yet possible to register for trainings. However, do not worry: the early bird rate will be available for all attendees who register for the trainings - all the way until right before the conference.
And don't forget - the call for papers is still open! If you have already submitted a talk, or are planning to submit one, we suggest you wait to register until you have received a confirmation on if the talk was accepted or not. The early bird rate will be available long enough for you to register after you have received this notification - and if your talk is accepted, attendance is of course free!
As usual, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us.
Call for papers - PGConf.EU 2011
PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2011 will be held on Ocober 18-21 in the Casa 400 Hotel in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It will cover topics for PostgreSQL users, developers and contributors, as well as decision and policy makers. For more information about the conference, please see the website at http://2011.pgconf.eu/.
We are now accepting proposals for talks. Please note that we are looking for talks in English, Dutch, German and French.
Each session will last 45 minutes, and may be on any topic related to PostgreSQL. Suggested topic areas include:
- Developing applications for PostgreSQL
- Administering large scale PostgreSQL installations
- Case studies and/or success stories of PostgreSQL deployments
- PostgreSQL tools and utilities
- PostgreSQL hacking
- Community & user groups
- Tuning the server
- Migrating from other systems
- Scaling/replication
- Benchmarking & hardware
- PostgreSQL related products
Of course, we're happy to receive proposals for talks on other PostgreSQL related topics as well.
We also have a limited number of longer, 90-minute, slots available. Please indicate clearly in your submission if you wish to make a 90-minute talk.
Finally, there will be a session of five minute lightning talks. A separate call for proposals will be made for them further on.
The submission deadline is August 21st, 2011. Selected speakers will be notified before Sep 5th, 2011.
Please submit your proposals by going to http://2011.pgconf.eu/callforpapers and following the instructions.
If your proposal is in a non-english language, please include a single-sentence description of the presentation in English as well in the field for submission notes.
The proposals will be considered by committee who will produce a schedule to be published nearer the conference date. If your proposal has been accepted, you will be informed by email within two weeks of the submission deadline.
This call for papers is also available on the web at http://2011.pgconf.eu/callforpapers
We look forward to hearing from you, and seeing you in Amsterdam in October!
PGConf.EU 2011 will be held in Amsterdam in October
It's time to mark your calendars: PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2011 (formerly known as PGDay.EU) will be held on October 18-21 at the Casa400 Hotel in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Like last year, the conference will be held in a hotel venue, combining both the conference rooms and guest rooms, so you don't have to waste any time finding your way around the city. As in previous years, the conference will include full catered coffee breaks and lunches, to make the most of the time. The first day of the conference will be a training day, and the following three days will be regular conference tracks. The conference will accept talks in English, Dutch, German and French, to benefit those attendees who prefer talks in their native language.
We are just starting our search for sponsors - if you are interested in sponsoring the conference, or know someone who is, please take a look at our sponsorship opportunities and don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or would like to propose an alternative arrangement.
We will also follow up with a call for papers later, and in due course open for registration and post a conference schedule. For now, mark the dates, and follow the news on our website and on our twitter stream @pgconfeu.