PGCon 2010 summary

I arrived home from PGCon 2010 yesterday. As always the conference was held in Ottawa, Canada to which many of the PostgreSQL developers now make an annual pilgrimage.

We started on Wednesday with the third annual developer meeting, this year held at Arc The Hotel for the second time. Many thanks to Nadine for ensuring everything went without a hitch. There were 29 developers present, working their way through a packed agenda in an extremely productive manner. There were some great ideas for 9.1, with lots of people claiming items to work on. If we get only half of that done, 9.1 will be an incredible release.

There are some photos from the meeting on my SmugMug page.

Thursday was the start of the conference proper, beginning with an excellent presentation from Gavin M. Roy comparing PostgreSQL with NoSQL databases. The talk can be heard here. I ducked in and out of a few more talks over the day, but spent much of my time working with Magnus and Stefan on the new infrastructure hosting platform that we're polishing off for the project's hosting.

On Thursday night we had the annual EnterpriseDB party, held at the Velvet Room. Good food, plenty of drink, and people discussing Postgres well into the early hours of Friday. Unfortunately I don't have any photos as I was too busy running around giving out beer tokens to remember to take any.

Friday was the second day of the main conference, starting at 10AM (thankfully) with David Fetter and Jonathan Leto kicking off my day talking about PL/Parrot. Dan hosted the closing session which consisted largely of an auction, the main purpose of which was to show how the PostgreSQL community can raise more money than the BSD community for charity. And we did. By quite some margin. The biggest earner being a PostgreSQL 9.0 sweatshirt signed by all of the developers at the developer meeting, which amid a circus of bidding between teams led by Jim Nasby and Gavin Roy ended up going for $1517, donated by both camps. Photos, are here.

The week was finished off with a short stop in Montreal with a number of other community members, before taking advantage of cheap Sunday flights to get back home for Monday morning!