PGDay Europe 2010 Registration Open

It's finally time - we've opened up for registrations for PGDay Europe 2010.

We are not finished with the schedule yet, so if you are looking for a specific talk, you'll have to wait a while longer. Work is in progress though - we've already notified some of our speakers that they are approved. However, if you submitted a talk and have not heard from us yet, it's not yet time to panic. The reason we haven't published a schedule yet is that we're working on ways to include more talks!

So why would you want to go register now, even though the schedule isn't posted yet? Well, first of all, the schedule is looking like it'll be at least as good as last year. We have several well known good speakers from the community showing up again, and also some fresh faces with interesting topics!

But more importantly, this year, we've added training for the first time. Training will run on the wednesday (the main conference being monday and tuesday). This training is limited availability (25 seats per session), and extra cost. You pay this at registration. And the seats are handed out on a first come/first serve basis. So if you want to attend the training, now is the time to register! The training schedule is final, so be sure not to pick two training sessions that run at the same time.

The conference this year will be held at the Millennium Hotel in Stuttgart. We do recommend that you reserve a room with that hotel, as we have a group rate there, and it's conveniently located (hint: no need to go outside to get from A to B). But using this hotel is not mandatory - you can book your room anywhere you like. However, it should be noted that wireless internet is only included if you booked a room using our group rate. If you don't, you can pre-purchase the access when you register, or you can solve it yourself for example using 3G data. We will not have the ability to provide or sell you wireless access unless you pre-purchase it!

With all that said, head off and register!

Feedback from pgday.eu

I've finally had the time to summarize the feedback we received from pgday.eu.

We received feedback from about 35 people, which is obviously way less than we were hoping for. Ideas for how to improve this for next time are very welcome! This also means that the figures we have are not very exact - but they should give a general hint about what our attendees thought.

I just sent out the individual session feedback summaries to each individual speaker. These will not be published - it's of course fine for each speaker to publish his own feedback if he wants to, but the conference organizers will not publish the detailed per-session data.

The statistics we do have show that most of our speakers did a very good job, and that the attendees were in general very happy with the sessions. We have also received a fairly large amount of comments - both to the conference and the speakers - which will help us improve specific points for next year!

I'll show a couple of graphs here with the total across all sessions and speakers. In these graphs, 5 is the highest score and 1 is the lowest.

The attendees also seemed to be very happy with our speakers, which is something I'm very happy to hear about. It's also good to see that almost nobody felt the speakers didn't know very well what they were talking about - always a worry with a conference that has so many experienced community people attending.

Actually trying to figure out which speaker is best using this data is very difficult. But here's a list of the top speakers based on speaker quality, who had more than 5 ratings on their talks. The list includes all speakers with an average score of at least 3.5. There are a lot more hovering around that line, but there has to be a cutoff somewhere... Again note that there are still not that many ratings to consider, so values are pretty unstable. I've included the standard deviation as well to make sure this is visible.

Place | Speaker | Score | Stddev | Num 1 | Gavin M. Roy | 4.9 | 0.5 | 18 2 | Guillaume Lelarge | 4.9 | 0.4 | 7 3 | Robert Hodges | 4.8 | 0.4 | 13 4 | Magnus Hagander | 4.8 | 0.4 | 20 5 | Jean-Paul Argudo | 4.8 | 0.5 | 8 6 | Joshua D. Drake | 4.6 | 0.7 | 9 7 | Simon Riggs | 4.6 | 0.6 | 17 8 | Dimitri Fontaine | 4.5 | 0.5 | 14 9 | Greg Stark | 4.3 | 0.5 | 8 10 | Vincent Moreau | 4.1 | 0.6 | 8 11 | Mark Cave-Ayland | 4.0 | 0.6 | 11 12 | David Fetter | 3.9 | 1.1 | 9 13 | Gabriele Bartolini | 3.7 | 1.0 | 15 14 | Heikki Linnakangas | 3.6 | 0.7 | 9

All of these are clearly very good numbers.

So once again, a big thanks to our speakers for their good work. And also a very big thanks to those who did fill out the session feedback forms - your input is very valuable!

Update: Yes, these graphs were made with a python script calling the Google Charts API. Does anybody know of a native python library that will generate goodlooking charts without having to call a remote web service?

My pgday.eu pictures are up

I've finally gotten around to uploading my pictures from PGDay.EU 2009 to [ my smugmug gallery].

Clearly the conference was tiring, and we all needed a rest... (yes, this was during JD's talk)

And as the picture says, don't forget to submit your feedback - the site is still open for that!

PGDay.EU 2009 - it's a wrap

I'm currently sitting on my flight home from Paris CDG, after a couple of very hectic days. It's going to be a couple of days (which in reality is going to drag out into a couple of weeks due to other work engagements and then travel for the JPUG conference) before it'll be possible to completely evaluate the conference and things around it, but here's what I have so far.

I'm going to leave the evaluation of the talks themselves to somebody else. There were many others of the "regular PostgreSQL bloggers" present at the conference and we've already seen some posts around it. Hopefully there will be more, both in French and English. If you are blogging about this and your blog isn't already up on Planet PostgreSQL, please consider adding it so that the community at large gets notification of your posts.

Continue reading

PGDay.EU day one

align="right" So, day one is almost finished, when it comes to the conference itself - and then it's off to the EnterpriseDB evening party. A quick summary of the day is: awesome.

Going into a little more detail, the day started with us actually getting up painfully early. Got to ParisTech in the morning, right as they opened up our room. I have to say the facilities at ParisTech have been great - the rooms are in great shape, perfect size, and all the A/V equipment is working perfectly. (Yes, there is a slight flicker on one of the projectors, but it's not bad).

I did the intro section with Jean-Paul, and there's really not much to say about that. We (well, I) forgot to add a slide about the feedback - oops. I bet that's one reason we don't have as much feedback entered yet as we'd like.

Simon took over with a keynote, which was very good. Simon is a very good speaker, and he found a good balance between technical and non-technical talks. It was a nice way to kick off the conference. At this time, we had somewhere between 125-150 people had shown up, which is definitely not bad.

I half-followed the English track after that, with talks about PostGIS and Data Warehousing, which were both very good talks. Also spent some time in the organization, which has really worked pretty smoothly. We've had a few minor issues, but they were all solved quickly.

Lunch was fantastic. Many thanks to our great caterers who served us an amazing lunch, with good organization, and more than enough food. Couldn't be better!

align="left" Watched Gavin's talk on scalability after lunch, which is always a good one. After that I had my own talk which went at least Ok, though I did finish a bit early. After that it was off to a pgadmin developer meeting, which is where I am now.

So I'd better go now, so I don't miss out on the activities.