Last week I was in Tallinn attending the 8th annual European PostgreSQL Conference. And this was my 4th one. It has become like a mid autumn tradition for me, get there and meet all the people that you see once a year. As the conference is always held in a different place, this time it was Tallinn. And, also, I was a speaker this year.
Monday, 31st October
My Tallinn adventure started very early, at the airport baggage claim carousel. So, my backpack got left at the Amsterdam airport. With all the winter stuff in it. After setting in, in the rented apartment, I went on a shopping spree to get at least a jacket and some other necessities.
Lessons learned: When traveling by plane have spare underwear and socks packed with you laptop.
Tuesday, 1st November
The next day I had a nice walk in Tallinn. I went first to the conference registration to avoid the crowd the next day. In the conference bag there was a present that saved the day: A warm hat. It came very handy until my stuff got from Amsterdam.
Unfortunately the sun sets at 16h so I hadn’t had the time to see much. But, also, I had to be back home and wait for my backpack to get delivered.
Wednesday, 2nd November
The conference started on Wednesday and I was getting a little nervous because my presentation was still not over yet. And it snowed the whole night.
My top picks for the first day would probably be:
- PGLogical - The Logical Replication for PostgreSQL by Petr Jelinek
- Advanced SQL with PostgreSQL by Gianni Ciolli
- PAF - auto failover and more! by Jehan-Guillaume (ioguix) de Rorthais
For those who don’t know it yet, the pgConfEU conference has official social events the first and second day of the conference. And that is the occasion to talk to people after you all loose up by the social catalyst called alcohol. At the Factory I met some very interesting people from Spain and Italy working in Vienna. And also made some bad choices of drinking vodka shots that night.
Thursday, 3rd November
Hangover or not, the second day of the conference is here. My presentation is still not done :( And the show is still falling. My friend from last night was nowhere to be found.
My top picks for the second day are:
- Extend BRIN support to PostGIS - Block Range INdexing on geospatial data by Giuseppe Broccolo and Julien Rouhaud
- HOT & Other UPDATE Optimizations by Simon Riggs
- The lightning talk by Vik Fearing - priceless
I was a little late to this evenings social event, because I was finishing my presentation. And, yes, I did finish it. And no drinks tonight. The second social event was held in the Rock Cafe and it was even better than the day before.
Friday, 4th November - D day
The presentation was ready, but I was not expecting so many people in the room. It was almost full. But it went ok, a few errors slipped in the presentation, but noting serious. And it felt very good when it was over. Sadly, I had no time to show some of the examples I planed to show.
Don’t Touch that Parameter
Photos from my presentation in the Omega room
My top picks for the third day are:
- Peeking into the black hole called PL/pgSQL - The new PL profiler by Jan Wieck
- A close look at stats - what you can do with them! by Cédric Villemain
And that was the end. It sounds really short when I write it, but it was a really good conference. They told us next year it will be held in Warsaw. I was hoping for a warmer place. But before we leave, we have to take a traditional photo.
pgConfEU traditional annual photo with 2ndQuadrant Italy
Every year I take a photo of me and the crew of 2ndQuadrant Italy. This year only Giuseppe Broccolo (right) and Gianni Ciolli (center) were here.
All the slides of the presentations held on the conference should be available on the conference Wiki, including mine as soon as I get the edit privileges. All the additional resources of the presentation I held are available in this BitBucket repository.
