Magnus Hagander's PostgreSQL Blog

I'm not going to go into any talk specifics, but just say that day 3 was the first day of regular talks, and it had a lot of very good talks. After that, we had the EnterpriseDB dinner party, which was also very good. They clearly won the dinner-party race over Yahoo! - no contest!

I've uploaded pictures from this day as well as the dinner party. They're all in the gallery. Most of the pictures are tagged with names - but I'd love to have some help going through the ones that aren't and fill in the proper names, since I don't know everybody. Feel free to help out by just sending me an email with names that are in pictures which aren't categorized.

The picture attached to this post is one I received from Bruce's boss based on one of my photos. No further comments needed I think.

Right now in Peters talk about our project management and release processes. I actually agree with most of them, which is a good sign - we think at least almost the same on how things are.

So, it's now official. Graciously folded into Selenas lightning talk, we have now announced that the legal forming of PostgreSQL Europe has finally come through. All the government bureaucracy is now finally done, and we are a registered european non-profit.

What this means in reality is that we now have a lot of actual work to do, and can no longer hide behind this fact. Until then, let's get working on the wiki or just fill our mailinglist with good ideas!

As usual, I forgot my USB cable. As is becoming usual, Selena came to my rescue and lent me hers so I got the pictures up. The first set is up on my gallery with some tagging and stuff.

More photos to come as the conference proceeds. But for now, I obviously have to post the one of Steven falling asleep at the table long before midnight... Kinda ruins his attempt to build a reputation, I think... But it's hard work being at a PostgreSQL conference - imagine how it was for those of us working at the developer meeting, Steven!

<initial rant>
So I didn't get around to posting the first day. And the second day I actually left the post in drafts and forgot to publish it, only remembering now on the morning of the third day. Ah, well, here's a slightly updated one...
</initial rant>

Yesterday was the developer meeting day for those of us who were involved in that, and a tutorial days for those who weren't. The developer meeting was basically a meetup between around 25 of the most active PostgreSQL developers, talking about. Well. Developer stuff. I'd say it was a big success. While we obviously didn't end up committing a bunch of things, several big things were discussed in person (and during the breaks), but most importantly we once again got a chance for some face-to-face time with our fellow developers - which I think is worth a lot. It helped a lot that almost everybody who's done a lot lately was there. Not quite everybody, but closer than I thought. The brain-trust in that room yesterday was quite amazing...

After that, it was a Yahoo! party in the evening, which supposedly had food and drinks. I only ever saw the drinks from that part and had to buy my own food (along with a couple of others), but hey, free drinks is not something I'm going to complain about. I forgot the cable to my camera, but as soon as I find one I'll try to get some pictures up... Oh, the occassion? They now do huge databases based on PostgreSQL.

Time to head off to breakfast in half an hour now, and then on to the keynote. I hope to sneak an announcement in there, so I guess I have to get there a tiny bit early.

At least it's new for me, and it's not on the list. Bugged a colleague of mine today, and we were both very surprised for a while until we figured it out. Ok, it's not very complex, but the deal was that:
SELECT CAST(1 as CHAR)
works, but
SELECT CAST (1 as CHAR)
does not (syntax error!)

Now, CAST is already horribly limited in MySQL (who came up with the idea that you shouldn't be able to cast to all available types if it's reasonable to do the conversion?! Like from int to text...), but this is just too much. Since when does whitespace before a parenthesis matter in SQL?! Sheesh...

Yet another reason to prefer PostgreSQL...

I found a couple of posts over on Planet MySQL today about some new announcement from the dolphin-herders. Apparantly, the Sun/MySQL combination is now starting to push at least some features for Enterprise customers only. AFAIK this isn't entirely new, since they've had some tools previously only available to enterprise customers, but I guess this would be a first for actual server code. (Though the way patches are moved between Enterprise and Community never really made sense to me, that's probably because I didn't study it in enough detail)

From what I can tell, this puts MySQL more towards the situation that PostgreSQL has with EnterpriseDB (and their now renamed product Postgres Plus Advanced Server) and some other companies. This is a proprietary product that sits on top of an open source foundation that is PostgreSQL. Now, EnterpriseDB initially marketed this product as opensource - which was incorrect, and they got quite a bit of bad press about it. The question is, what will Sun/MySQL do now. Will they continue to market their Enterprise product as Open Source, which it obviously isn't, or will they change that?

I have now arrived home in Stockholm again, after PostgreSQL Conference East. The second day of the conference continued with talks as good as the first day, though I missed one I really wanted to go because it was at the same time as I had my own. One speaker didn't show up, but I believe that was the only talk that didn't go off as planned.

Summary: someone will have to invite me to a bad one soon, because for now I can just repeat myself and say that I've yet again been to a great PostgreSQL conference.

Since JD tagged me as a conference photographer, I've uploaded all the pictures I've taken to my gallery. I included the ones that aren't so good as well, since some people are only present in such pictures. If something is mis-labeled or un-labeled-but-should-be, please send me an email! I expect JD might be doing something more official with some of these later.

After the conference, a bunch of us went into DC and saw some of the touristy sites, and went for dinner in Georgetown. Bruce managed to loose the second car in our caravan-of-two by going up a very steep hill - against a one-way street. All in all, exciting driving, and very nice for those of us who hadn't been to DC before to get a chance to see the sights. Big thanks to Bruce for getting us there and around, and to the other people who helped drive folks around!

On Monday me, Bruce, Selena and Nikolay went to the Air and Space Museum - good stuff! Selena and Nikolay took a cab to bus-station and airport halfway through. On the way to the airport we stopped by in Arlington and had lunch with a friend of mine who lives around there that I haven't seen in a couple of years. Always nice to be able to get such things in when on a trip like this.

Pictures from these secondary activities are up in a separate gallery.

After a long but uneventful (well, the pilot said there was severe turbulence for an hour or so in the middle, but I slept right through it) flight home, that's it for this time! Tomorrow it's back to the regular schedule of going to work (more on this later).

So I'm here at PostgreSQL Conference East in College Park, MD. Didn't have time to do any blogging yesterday, so someone managed to blog about it before me... JD somehow managed to make me one of the semi-official camera-in-your-face people (photographer, if that wasn't painfully clear), so I've also been running around getting a bunch of pictures so far. They'll be up on my galleries later when I've managed to look through them a bit to remove the most crappy ones - and I'll try to get them onto the shared photo stream as well.

So far, the conference has been very good. Most talks I've been to are really high quality and interesting stuff, and the organization has worked very well (except possibly for Bruce sending Denis off to the wrong end of campus, but he made it in time for dinner so things ended up fine).

...is not over yet. There are still things to go. But I've finished off my two talks (one on "win32 development in a unix project" (no, there was no code at all in this) and one on "building search.postgresql.org" (very little code in this one). I think they went reasonably well, we'll see what others say when I check around some more...

Not quite as many people came to our booth today, at least not the time I was there, but there were still a lot of people. We had more talks instead, so I'd still classify the day as a big success.

It's now the morning of the second day of FOSDEM, and my third day in Brussels. Right now, we have a talk from Gabriele Bartolini about the Italian PUG. Yesterday was packed with several good talks from a lot of different people, and a really packed booth. I've never seen a pg booth that had this many people or this much stuff (flyers, folders, t-shirts, mugs, those lovely elephants, pins, etc etc). Lots of visitors, and lots of interesting questions.