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Am 11. November findet im Rheinischen Industriemuseum die Deutschsprachige PostgreSQL Konferenz 2011 statt. Dazu wurde jetzt der Call for Papers gestartet, Vorträge können zu allen PostgreSQL-relevanten Themen bis zum 15. September 2011 eingereicht werden.

Weitere Informationen gibt es auf der Webseite zur Konferenz: http://2011.pgconf.de/

Im Anschluß an die Konferenz findet über das Wochenende die OpenRheinRuhr statt. Die Eintrittskarten für die Konferenz sind ebenfalls für diese Veranstaltung gültig.

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum

Second - and last day - of PGCon 2011 is over. It was a very good conference, I got new ideas and learned a lot.

My conference day started with Jeff Davis' talk about "Range Types". This is imho a very useful new feature.

Had to skip the second slot because of some work and several phone conferences.

Afternoon started with Tom Lane's "Hacking the Query Planner - Part II". This was the continuation of yesterday's talk.

Greg Smith presented some insights of performance tuning under heavy load in his "The Write Stuff" talk. Very interesting. I finally have to buy his book.

The last was given by Dan Ports and Kevin Grittner about the new "Serializable Snapshot Isolation in Postgres". At first sight it sounds strange, but after a second thought it makes sense. It also includes some very advanced research stuff ;-)

PGCon ended with the "Closing sessions". Dan auctioned off some cool items, like several books, shirts, one of our plush elephants and posters. This collected 1705 Canadian Dollar and will be spent to a charity organization. Congratulations!

In the evening we went for a little party, sponsored by PGExperts. I also brought myself a cup of ice cream. This is a good day ;-)

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum

PGCon started today with a bunch of interesting talks. The weather in the morning was unsurprisingly bad, it was heavily raining. Also there was an announcement about a new PostgreSQL Conference (Postgres Open Conference), taking place in September in Chicago.

Paul Ramsey gave the keynote and talked about PostGIS. It's quite clear, why PostGIS is one of the "most pushing" extensions, in terms of new features in PostgreSQL.

The next talk on my list was Robert Treat, talking about "Database Scalability Patterns: Sharding for Unlimited Growth". Honestly, I found this talk not very interesting, because Robert was just talking about his view and his implementation of sharding, whereas the talk description spoke about a more general overview.

After that I moved to Gurjeet Singt and his talk about "Best practices with Ora2Pg". This talk was quite interesting and gave a broad overview about the existing problems and how Ora2PG is (trying to) solve them.

Selena Marie spoke next about "Maintaining Terabytes" and earned 8 beer later the day for the big number of tables in here database ;-)

I skipped the next talk and went to a nearby copy shop and printed a bunch of PGConf.EU flyers. We spread them all over the place and hopefully now everyone knows about our major conference in Amsterdam later this year.

Tom Lane is desperately looking for new query planner hackers and explained the different planner steps in detail. Looks like he has to continue his talk tomorrow, because there are too many details involved ;-)

Last talk(s) for today where the Lightning Talks. Jan Wieck and myself submitted a talk about our two IRC bots and explained shortly the upcoming new versions and included features. There were some more Lightning Talks, some very serious, and some very funny. Bruce earned 9 beers for making people using pg_upgrade ;-)

After the official part, it was time for the social event. Sponsored by EnterpriseDB, we met in a restaurant about 10 minutes away from the venue. Because of the warm dinner food it was quite hot in the room, but luckily there were free drinks for everyone. I also went to the nearby ice cream shop to make this a perfect day. During the evening I had the chance to talk with many people and had a fair amount of interesting discussions.

Waiting for the second day of the conference.

Yeah, FOSDEM is already a week ago, but I found no time to blog about the event. Anyway, here I go:

This years edition of FOSDEM was very successfull, especially for the PostgreSQL project. We got two tables in the main building, which gave us plenty of space to present the project and talk with visitors. In addition, we had our devroom in the main building too. So, thank you to the FOSDEM team for this smart move.

The devroom had many visitors for all talks. We managed to have 6 talks, three very technical and three more user orientated.

I came with a car full of stuff to Brussels, and leaved on Sunday with just two boxes. We gave away all stressballs and all pens, and sold all elephants (again) and mugs. Only one or two bags from PGDay.EU 2010 are left and several shirts. Time to order new merchandising stuff ;-) The Perl table next to us brought a very large camel, obviously an eye-catcher.

This year I also found time to visit other interesting talks, and managed to meet good friends again. As every year, it was a very good event, just a bit cold outside ;-)

The FOSDEM team finally puzzled the Pentabarf together and published all Track and Devroom schedules.

The PostgreSQL Project has room H.2213 in the main building, on sunday. Please join us for some very famous talks, you can find the schedule here.

We also have a booth on both Saturday and Sunday, as usual in the AW building.

A place for the friday evening meetup will be announced shortly on the mailinglist.

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum

Im Rahmen der Ringvorlesung "IT-Sicherheit" wird Jens Kubieziel am Dienstag, dem 01.02.2011 einen Vortrag über "Anonym durchs Internet mit Tor & Co." halten. Der Eintritt ist frei, eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich.

Veranstaltungsort: Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg, Gebäude 10, Raum 460

Zeit: Dienstag, 01.02.2011, von 19:00 Uhr bis ca. 21:00 Uhr

Die Veranstaltung wird von der Magdeburger außen- und sicherheitspolitischen Hochschulgruppe in Kooperation mit dem Magdeburger Institut für Sicherheitsforschung durchgeführt.

Nähere Informationen auf der Webseite: http://www.sicherheitspolitik.net/

Diese Veranstaltung bei Xing: *klick*

Im Rahmen der Ringvorlesung "IT-Sicherheit" wird Frank Hofmann am Dienstag, dem 25.01.2011 einen Vortrag über "Sichere Benutzer-Authentifikation an sensiblen IT-Systemen" halten. Der Eintritt ist frei, eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich.

Veranstaltungsort: Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg, Gebäude 10, Raum 460

Zeit: Dienstag, 25.01.2011, von 19:00 Uhr bis ca. 21:00 Uhr

Die Veranstaltung wird von der Magdeburger außen- und sicherheitspolitischen Hochschulgruppe in Kooperation mit dem Magdeburger Institut für Sicherheitsforschung durchgeführt.

Nähere Informationen auf der Webseite: http://www.sicherheitspolitik.net/

Diese Veranstaltung bei Xing: *klick*

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum

Update: Der Vortrag von Erich Möchel muss leider ausfallen. Ersatzweise hält Stefan Schumacher einen Vortrag über "Daten sicher löschen".

Im Rahmen der Ringvorlesung "IT-Sicherheit" wird Erich Möchel am Dienstag, dem 11.01.2011 einen Vortrag über den englischen Fernmelde-Geheimdienst GCHQ und seinen Einfluss auf europäische Telekommunikationsnormen halten. Der Eintritt ist frei, eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich.

Veranstaltungsort: Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg, Gebäude 10, Raum 460

Zeit: Dienstag, 18.01.2011, von 19:00 Uhr bis ca. 21:00 Uhr

Die Veranstaltung wird von der Magdeburger außen- und sicherheitspolitischen Hochschulgruppe in Kooperation mit dem Magdeburger Institut für Sicherheitsforschung durchgeführt.

Nähere Informationen auf der Webseite: http://www.sicherheitspolitik.net/

Diese Veranstaltung bei Xing: *klick*

Im Rahmen der Ringvorlesung "IT-Sicherheit" wird Stefan Schumacher am Dienstag, dem 11.01.2011 einen Vortrag über "Sichere Passwörter" halten. Der Eintritt ist frei, eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich.

Veranstaltungsort: Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg, Gebäude 10, Raum 460

Zeit: Dienstag, 11.01.2011, von 19:00 Uhr bis ca. 21:00 Uhr

Die Veranstaltung wird von der Magdeburger außen- und sicherheitspolitischen Hochschulgruppe in Kooperation mit dem Magdeburger Institut für Sicherheitsforschung durchgeführt.

Nähere Informationen auf der Webseite: http://www.sicherheitspolitik.net/

Diese Veranstaltung bei Xing: *klick*

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum

The second conference day started with stress: the schedule was wrong in the booklet, the first talks in the morning were scheduled with 20 minutes instead of 50. This was the reason why so many visitors showed up early ;-) We decided to cut the next talks 5 minutes short and take 5 or 10 minutes from the breaks. After lunch we were back in schedule again.

Because of a PGEU board meeting - originally scheduled before the first talk, but then delayed because of the booklet error - I missed the first talk in the morning. Then I attended Stefan "mastermind" Kaltenbrunner's talk about "Benchmarking and performance tests for and with PostgreSQL" - and yes, I learned something new. The next slot in the same room was reserved for my talk about "Porting databases from MySQL to PostgreSQL". Not so many visitors as for my previous talk, but not everyone is interested in this topic anyway. We had some nice discussions and I got the impression that not everybody is aware about the amount of problems which raises such a project.

After the excellent lunch I was room host for Gianni Ciolli and his talk about "Windows that Work: How to use complex SQL for the greater good" as well as for Dimitri Fontaine and his talk about "PostgreSQL extension's development". I learned that now it's a good time to rewrite my table_log extension and port it to the upcoming extension infrastructure.

The last slot of the day was reserved for Ed Boyajian and his presentation about "PostgreSQL's time to shine". He included some very interesting numbers, you can find this (and most of the other) slides on the PG wiki.

Dave and Magnus really got the last word ;-) They told us about the success for this year's conference, showed some numbers and then we thanked all speakers and helpers (especially Harald and the guys from imos).