PgCon 2008 – big announcements, community conversations

PgCon was a very exciting conference, with a lot of people from Europe, Asia, Australia and South America traveling to be part of it. I read that 175 people attended, and based on how crowded both parties were, it’s not hard to believe!

The biggest announcement for me was that the PostgreSQL Europe is finally a non-profit organization! I made a slide for my lightning talk with Magnus, Gabriele, Jean-Paul and Andreas on it:

PgEU announced

I got a ton of great feedback about the User Groupalooza slides. I also enjoyed meeting Jean-Paul Argudo, a fellow Drupaler.

There were a bunch of community-focused conversations, some focused inward on developers, some looking out to the rest of the world from inside Pg, and others from the outside looking in:

All the talks were recorded, so I look forward to listening to them again – without the distraction of Twitter! 🙂

A couple talks I thought were really great for web developers were:

  • Magnus Hagander’s search.postgresql.org talk gave some great examples and code showing how to use PostgreSQL’s tsearch capabilities with a PHP-based website.
  • Clark Evan’s talk on HTSQL, a REST-ful web inteface application. It looks pretty cool and I’m interested in trying it out. They are using it for medical records report generation and have even given the ability to generate queries to the end users.

Thanks so much to Dan who got me to the conference this year! I learned a lot, and really enjoyed meeting so many people that I’ve only communicated with over email for the past three years.

At PgCon in Ottawa, Day 1

Oops, this got published early. I’ll be updating this shortly.. probably over lunch.

Magnus posted some photos already!

Summary of last night:

We had a great time last night at the pub for registration, and then over to the Yahoo! party. We had fun talking databases, beer, and the difficulty in trying to understand Australian accents. I learned from Tom (not Tom Lane) that Adelaide, Australia has a fantastic wine-growing region. Alvarro once again recommended that Jeff commit his time interval data type. I think Jeff was convinced to do this for 8.4. Now I have to update the documentation!