It’s this time of the year again, the main international PostgreSQL Conference is next week in Ottawa, Canada. If previous years are any indication, this will be great event where to meet with a lot of the members of your community. The core team will be there, developers will be there, and we will meet with users and their challenging use cases.

This is a very good time to review both what you did in the project those last 12 months, and what you plan to do next year. To help with that, several meeting events are organized. They’re like a whole-day round table with a kind of an agenda, with a limited number of invited people in, and very intense on-topic discussions about how to organize ourselves for another great year of innovation in PostgreSQL.

Then we have two days full of talks where I usually learn some new aspect of the project or of the product, and where ideas tend to just pop-up in a continuous race. Being away from home and with people you see only once a year (some of them more than that of course, hi European fellows!) seems to allow for some broader thinking.

The talks I want to go to include Database Scalability Patterns: Sharding for Unlimited Growth by Robert Treat, Maintaining Terabytes by Selena Deckelmann, NTT’s Case Report by Tetsuo Sakata, Hacking the Query Planner by Tom Lane. That’s for a first day, right?

Then, on the second day, I notice Range Types by Jeff Davis, SP-GiST - a new indexing infrastructure for PostgreSQL by Oleg and Teodor, The Write Stuff by Greg Smith (a colleague at 2ndQuadrant).

I will miss Serializable Snapshot Isolation in Postgres by Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, unfortunately, because I’ll be talking about Extensions Development at the same time.

Well of course this list is just a first selection, hallway tracks are often what guides me through talks or make me skip some.

See you there!