FOSDEM 2010

Well, FOSDEM 2010 is now over and it all seemed to go pretty well. The PostgreSQL Project was represented well (as one would hope for our second biggest annual European gathering), with the majority of the Hotel Agenda Louise seemingly occupied by database geeks.

On the Friday night we had a database dinner at Les Brasseurs de la Grand Place where we were joined by Sergey Petrunya and Kristian Nielsen from MariaDB. Good conversation, good beer and good food followed later by an aborted attempt to join the FOSDEM Beer Event at Cafe Delirium (it was just too busy) and a successful landing at the Irish pub a short walk from the Hotel.


Saturday morning was the start of the conference itself. We'd hoped to scrounge an extra table (much needed, with the number of people and the amount of swag we had), but unfortunately that didn't work out. Somehow, we managed to squeeze onto one.


The talks started at 1PM in our dev room (which we only had for Saturday afternoon unfortunately). Magnus and Jean-Paul started with report on the state of PostgreSQL Europe, and then it was my turn with my talk on "Developments in PostgreSQL 9.0". Slides and the full schedule can be found on the PostgreSQL Wiki. The dev room was basically packed solid with people sitting on the floor for every talk. Please FOSDEM organisers - give us a bigger room next year!


Saturday night was a late dinner at possibly the slowest restaurant in the world, who clearly weren't expecting too many diners. Food wasn't too bad though, when it finally arrived.

Sunday was spent mostly on the booth and (in my case) in lots of ad-hoc meetings on topics such as the new PostgreSQL project infrastructure thats in development, as well as PGDay.EU 2010 which is being planned in Amsterdam.

Most of us left at around 5PM, with Heikki, Greg, Magnus, Stefan and I heading for the airport. After pizza and a brief scare when Stefan lost his boarding pass, we left for home. Goodbye Brussels, see you next year.

More photos can be found here.