I can’t really compare PgCon 2009 with previous years versions, last time I enjoyed the event it was in 2006, in Toronto. But still I found the experience to be a great one, and I hope I’ll be there next year too!

I’ve met a lot of known people in the community, some of them I already had the chance to run into at Toronto or Prato, but this was the first time I got to talk to many of them about interresting projects and ideas. That only was awesome already, and we also had a lot of talks to listen to: as others have said, it was really hard to get to choose to go to only one place out of three.

I’m now back home and seems to be recovering quite fine from jet lag, and I even begun to move on the todo list from the conference. It includes mainly Skytools 3 testing and contributions (code and documentation), Extension Packaging work (Stephen Frost seems to be willing to help, which I highly appreciate) begining with search_path issues, and posting some backtrace to help fix some SPI_connect() bug at _PG_init() time in an extension.

The excellent lightning talk about How not to Review a Patch by Joshua Tolley took me out of the dim, I’ll try to be bright enough and participate as a reviewer in later commit fests (well maybe not the first next ones as some personal events on the agenda will take all my “free” time)…

Oh and the Golconde presentation gave some insights too: this queueing based solution is to compare to the listen/notify mechanisms we already have in PostgreSQL, in the sense that’s it’s not transactional, and the events are kept in memory only to achieve very high distribution rates. So it’s a very fine solution to manage a distributed caching system, for example, but not so much for asynchronous replication (you need not to replicate events tied to rollbacked transactions).

So all in all, spending last week in Ottawa was a splendid way to get more involved in the PostgreSQL community, which is a very fine place to be spending ones free time, should you ask me. See you soon!