Thursday, May 24, 2007

PGCon Day 4

So, black nail polish actually comes off in the shower with a bit of manual labor ...

Nikolay and I gave our talk in the morning. Everything went well, I thought. I got good feedback afterwards, plus a dozen people who were supposedly sorry to have missed it. :-)

Then I saw Neil Conway's talk "Stream Processing with PostgreSQL", which is pretty much the story of my life over the past half year, because their system wasn't yet available and we had to build our own. I hope they finish their product soon, so we all have something to play with.

Then I went to the PGCluster-II talk by Atsushi Mitani. This thing is not ready for production, because the write performance is terrible. I'm not sure I'm optimistic, but I think it's good that this architecture is at least tried out. In fact, I've heard other people being interested in similar things, so if you think shared storage clusters are worthwhile, check this out and help.

Finally, we had lightning talks, which showed a bunch of new little pieces of software, including an accounting package, a package manager for Windows, air traffic control using PostgreSQL, odbclink, pgAdmin III on a Windows CE mobile phone, and — shock — a new multimaster replication system. I think I forgot one.

After that we had a wrap-up session with a charity auction and lots of laugh. We made a group photo which should be available somewhere sometime soon.

Thanks to Dan and associates for organizing this. Thanks to all the sponsors for helping the conference and funding various meals. And thanks to everyone who came and said hi to me.