So, as part of our work porting Slony-I to Windows, and adding full support to pgAdmin, Andreas, Magnus and I were invited to present our work at a seminar in Tokyo, organised by Hiroshi Saito and his employer, SKC. We met in the departure lounge at London Heathrow from where we flew to Narita, Tokyo on Wednesday last week. Hiroshi met us at the airport, and brought us back to our hotel in Shimbashi.
The first evening we attended a welcome party with various members of the Japan PostgreSQL Users Group or JPUG for short. After a good meal and plenty of food it was off to bed to recover from the 30 hour first day!
On Friday we travelled by train to the seminar, and after an Italian lunch(!!) proceeded to give our talks to around 70 JPUG members. I spoke first on replication in general, and then on the Slony porting project and how we worked. An hour later, Magnus took to the stage and discussed the details of porting slon in more depth, and then gave a perfectly executed demonstration of Slony-I running on Windows. Finally, Andreas discussed the new management features added to pgAdmin.
[From left to right, Andreas Pflug, Magnus Hagander, myself and Hiroshi Saito]
After the presentation, we headed down to the restaurant in the building for and evening reception with beer, buffet and even a little bingo. Lot's of business cards were exchanged with a variety of PostgreSQL users and developers, and even one of the Firebird team!!
On Saturday, we spent a day sight-seeing, mainly in Kamakura where we visted a couple of temples and a very large cast iron Buddha. Lunch was Korean barbeque, following which we took a trip back to Tokyo station on the Shinkansen, or Bullet Train. A few beers in the 'Victorian Pub' across the courtyard from the hotel entrance, and it was off to bed before the journey back to the UK, Sweden and Germany in the morning.
All told, an excellent trip on which we were welcomed by our extremely hospitable Japanese friends. Many thanks in particular to Hiroshi Saito and SKC, not to mention the rest of the JPUG members.
