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!

PostgreSQL Conference – Keynote commentary

Theo Schlossnagle wrote a great blog post about Joshua Drake’s keynote. I wanted to respond to some of his comments here.

I totally agree with Theo that we need to be disruptive! One criticism I have had in the past of the PostgreSQL community is that it has been too centralized, and not willing to experiment with social networking, wikis and other non-hierarchical tools that will get more *end* *users* actively contributing.

I think all of that is changing with the creation of the PostgreSQL-EU and USPgA groups, and the fast uptake in PostgreSQL User Groups in the last few months.

Also, I also respectfully disagree with some comments that were made in other sessions about “us not wanting” the type of users that choose MySQL. *I* want those users to come to my user group meetings. There’s tons we can learn from each other.

We will make PostgreSQL better if we hear and respond directly to criticism from users of the most popular open source database. I’m not saying that Tom Lane and Bruce Momjian need to do that. PUGs should be doing this, filtering out the good/important stuff and communicating information back to -hackers and -core. That’s a great service the user groups can provide to postgresql.org.

Finally, I am so excited about a Baltimore/Washington PUG!! I had several people approach me about a group. I think even the MySQL guy will be interested. 🙂