Yesterday I had the pleasure to speak at the first edition of Codemotion in Rome. The event is the evolution of the “Java Day” in Italy, which now embraces different technologies as well. The idea behind this event - and I believe it is something we have to learn as well as PostgreSQL community members - is to go beyond our preferred technology and organise a joint conference with other user groups. Save money, save energies, save time (spare time).
The outcome has been brilliant. Very well organised, with a big presence (I think about a thousand people were there).
The conference simply targets ICT new
technologies, no language in particular, no discrimination between
closed or open source. Several parallel sessions and even a round table
for user groups (where ITPUG had the chance to present their activities
and get to know other communities).
My talk, originally submitted by ITPUG founder and vice president Luca Ferrari, was about PostgreSQL 9. Speaking in front of a general audience I had prepared a generic talk covering two main parts: the PostgreSQL project (focused on the history, the community, the license and the development cycle) and PostgreSQL 9, more technical.
Even though I was speaking at 4PM (on a Saturday), my room was almost packed and about ~100 people have been listening for 40 minutes, coming up with very interesting questions. About 20% of them were already using PostgreSQL, the remaining were interested in it for their next projects, in particular Oracle (about 30% of them) and MySQL (the rest, more worried about the future of it).
By analysing the reaction of the audience, some of the most appreciated features were:
- Hot Standby and streaming replication
- High availability
- Transparent text compression (no CLOBs! for developers)
- XML data type and Unicode support (for developers)
- Asynchronous commit
But when I said that we were about to introduce synchronous replication (with transaction control), you can imagine the reaction. :)
I thank once again Luca for submitting a talk to such a conference. I backed him up because he could not be there, but I believe that this sort of activity is what a community member should do.
Finally, a mention to the “Macaroni Bros”, the authors of the spot for the conference about “Apple’s new product released at Codemotion”. I had the pleasure to meet them and have a chat with them (one of them, Bob Trust in the video, actually used PostgreSQL for his PhD).
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