Monday 27 October 2008

LinuxLive Report

PostgreSQL had a booth in the .Org Village at LinuxLive/MacLive on Thursday, Friday and Saturday of last week.

Greg Stark and I attended all three days, and brought badges, pins and shirts from the UK conference, as well as signs, flyers and demo hardware from our office. Mark Cave-Ayland split his time between our booth and his companies on all three days. Simon Riggs joined us on the Friday, during which time he was interviewed by the Ubuntu guys for their regular podcast. Gianni Ciolli joined us on the Saturday.

The show was pretty quiet, with both .Org and commercial stands commenting similarly. We did see a fairly steady stream of people throughout all three days however, with roughly a 50/50 split between existing users stopping for a chat, advice or to find out what's going to be in 8.4, and potential new users. By far the most popular question asked was 'why should I use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL', second to which were questions about replication (ie. when will we see PostgreSQL RAC? !!).

Things we should have taken but don't have include:

- PG vs. MySQL flyers
- PG.EU flyers. What is it, mailing lists, conferences etc.
- 'Famous users' poster
- 'What's new in 8.4' poster
- Usage example posters (eg. company Foo use PG + Slony to do whizz bang stuff).
- Elephant Juice (after seeing people getting merry on 'Drupal Drops'!)

Thanks to all those who helped out, and 'hi' to anyone that stopped by the booth, and to the guys from Debian, OpenBSD/OpenSSH, UKUUG, Bongo, OpenNMS and anyone else we were hanging out with!

Dodgy pics from the phone at http://www.flickr.com/photos/29058417@N03/