PGDayEU 2010

I had the big luck to be able to attend the first day of PGDay EU conference here in Stuttgart. Conference was held at the SI-Erlebniszentrum - a location well known to me as the Java Forum Stuttgart took place there for many years.

The conference had around 200 attendees and the main tracks were given in two large rooms. Almost all of the "celebrities" like Simon Riggs, Dave Fetter, Magnus Hagander, Heikki Linnegas, Bruce Momijan (with this son!) were there.

I am not too much a database expert, so talks were very technical to me :) But not non-understandable :-)

One definitively cool talk was given by Gianni Ciolly from 2ndquadrant: he was playing chess against postgres (http://twitpic.com/3dfojr and http://yfrog.com/2q3nq01j). Gianni showed the SQL involved and then played against the DB. The chess figures involved were just done by UTF-8 characters :-)

Bruce Momijan talked about rapid upgrades from 8.x (or even 9.0) to 9.x via the re-written db_upgrade. With it upgrades of a huge database can take as little as 44 seconds (in link mode). Definitively something to have a look at.

After lunch I talked about "Servermonitoring mit RHQ" (in German). I had ~ 40 attendees, which was nice. There definitively was interest and I got some good questions afterwards. I've put my slides online at http://www.pilhuhn.de/hwr/misc/PGDay_EU_2010.pdf . If you want to know more about RHQ, visit http://rhq-project.org.

After attending Simon Riggs' talk about replication, I went to Devrim Gündüz, who was talking about failover using the Red Hat Cluster suite. This talk was very nicely presented with a lot of involvement of the speaker :-)

In the evening EnterpriseDB sponsored a party with food and drinks. There were lots of interesting talks at the tables going on, people all were very nice.

So this PGDay was a very positive experience for me. Unfortunately I could not make it to the 2nd day with more interesting talks.