ads' corner

Another day in Ottawa. Parts of the crowd attended the PL Developer Summit. Another part ventured the city. Personally I took the chance and got some sleep - only woken up by the room service, calling me and asking me when they can cleanup my room. H***, what is the reason of the "Do not disturb" sign on my door?

In the afternoon I went with Devrim to yesterday's place and we found most of the folks there. I'm not sure if they went again to the pub, or stayed all night ;-)

After a long search for a dinner restaurant, we finally decided to follow Greg oh je and ended up in the Hard Rock Cafe - this was actually Devrim's recommendation. We should really stop following Greg!

The dinner was decent, and guess where we went next? Right: the Royal Oak ;-)

During some drinks we found out, that we still have one or two months without PostgreSQL conferences. But I already heard Selena muttering about a "Query Planner Summit". This will be an interesting summer!

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 ;-)

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.

Postgre NoSQL - that's what Devrim was talking about in the Royal Oak pub. But more about his big failure later.

Yesterday in the evening I finally arrived in Ottawa. After some years trying to go to PGCon and somehow managed every year to be fully booked during the conference time. So it's my first PGCon, but hopefully not the last one. Obviously there are like a dozen "Royal Oak" pubs in the city, but after some rough directions from David Fetter ("it's the nearest one") I finally found the PostgreSQL crowd and got some breakfast.

Today started with some shopping and lunch together with Stefan - mastermind - Kaltenbrunner and Thom - dark_ixion - Brown. Afternoon we "checked in" for the conference, again in the Royal Oak pub ;-) and again we met more PostgreSQL folks. Dinner was with EnterpriseDB, thanks for the invitation!

Finally after dinner we headed back to ... the Royal Oak, where else? ;-)

Somehow we managed to loose most of the EDB folks on the way to the pub, but Tom Lane and Robert Haas joined us later. That's where Devrim, after some beer, talked himself into an early Postgre grave ;-)

Good night, see you tomorrow at the conference (finally a conference which I can attend without being involved into the planning ;-) )