Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum
I had the honor to present at PgConf.Russia 2016. It's probably the biggest PostgreSQL conference in Europe (News report), even bigger than pgconf.eu. It shows that PostgreSQL, and Open Source in general, has a big and growing market share. Was the first time that I travelled to Russia, and as with almost every new country, it is incredible. Also it is nice to be not in charge for a conference, and to enjoy the time attending talks, discuss with others or get stuff done.
My talk is about "how we made Greenplum Open Source", you can find the slides on my website*click*. It's not very technical, instead I talk about all the difficulties we had, the progress we made and the experience we gained from the time Pivotal announced that Greenplum will be Open Source, until it finally happened.
Also I used the chance to attend a few other talks, and learn something new. Most remarkable was the talk from Greg Stark about all the search improvements made in PostgreSQL back from version 7.x to the very latest 9.5. It shows that there is always room for improvements, and sometimes it's a huge gain.
The conference organizers provided a nice room for the speakers, and they even had a cappuccino maker there! Not just a machine, but someone who takes your order and makes you a cappuccino or another soft drink. That's very nice!
On Saturday, after the conference, we visited the "Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics". There is a huge monument outside, called "Conquerors of Space". The museum is in the building under the monument, and it shows artefacts from the beginning of space exploration (Sputnik 1) all the way to Mir and ISS.