The PGConf “marathon” 2013 is over, two weeks filled with traveling are over. First step Dublin, Ireland followed up by the small town of Oberhausen, Germany. We followed presentations, exchanged experiences and enjoyed the social events and now we are back in Berlin with lots of positive impressions from the growing PostgreSQL community.
At the European conference in Dublin we used the lightning talks to present our PostgreSQL monitoring setup with pg_view and PGObserver and to fuel the interest into Valentine’s talk the next day about Elephants in Fashion. Valentine dived into our PostgreSQL experience, the setup and the processes surrounding our database development and infrastructure. This promotion payed off, we got a lot of attendees to our talk and quite a few questions were raised and hallway discussions triggered.
On other frontiers it was interesting to learn about successful migrations to PostgreSQL and deployments on powerful machines including large SSD drives. Talks about upcoming PostgreSQL features and development plans shed some insight into what to expect in the “near” future or years ahead. Features strengthening PostgreSQL in the world of business intelligence seem promising, including the min/max indexes. Current work on logical replication, which may finally lead to rolling major version upgrades, is of particular interest in our always available world.
Back from Ireland just one week later we headed to the German-speaking PostgreSQL conference to get to know the German user base and give our second talk, this time in German with a slight variation in what was covered, using some of the feedback we got the week before. It was a nice surprise to see some familiar faces and continue the exchange on topics initiated the week before. Following different talks including ones from German government institutions it seems PostgreSQL is on the right path to replace some of the expensive proprietary database setups, the overall impression is that PostgreSQL can deliver and provides a lot of flexibility.
Before we share our slides with you, we want to thank all those involved in organizing both the PGConf Europe and its German counterpart for their hard work, and to #blameMagnus for what did not work.
Valentine’s talk from Dublin in English: Elephants in fashion
My own slides in German from PGConf.de: Elefanten sind in Mode
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