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.