Last week was PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2012 in Prague, and it’s been awesome. Many thanks to the organisers who did manage to host a very smooth conference with 290 attendees, including speakers. That means you kept walking into interesting people to talk to, and in particular the Hallway Track has been a giant success. *Photo by [Oleg Bartunov](http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/)* I did have the chance to speak several times at that event, and you can get the slides at my Conferences page that I try to keep up to date.

I’ve been given a nice puzzle that I think is a good blog article opportunity, as it involves some thinking and window functions.

PostgreSQL 9.2 is released! It’s an awesome new release that I urge you to consider trying and adopting, an upgrade from even 9.1 should be very well worth it, as your hardware could suddenly be able to process a much higher load. Indeed, better performances mean more work done on the same budget, that’s the name of the game! As a PostgreSQL contributor though, the release of 9.2 mainly means to me that it’s time to fully concentrate on preparing 9.

Please welcome the new stable version of El-Get, the much awaited version 4.1 has now been branched for your pleasure. It’s packed with lots of features to make your life easy, comes with a Info documentation book and even has a logo. That’s no joke, I found one, at least: Why El-Get is relevant Emacs 24.1 is the first release that includes package.el, and it even allows the user to setup several sources where to fetch packages.

I stumbled onto an interesting article about performance when using python, called Python performance the easy(ish) way, where the author tries to get the bet available performances out of the dumbiest possible python code, trying to solve a very simple and stupid problem. With so many smart qualifiers you can only guess that I did love the challenge. The idea is to write the simplest code possible and see how smarter you need to be when you need perfs.

The PostgreSQL community host a number of conferences all over the year, and the next ones I’m lucky enough to get to are approaching fast now. First, next month in September, we have Postgres Open in Chicago, where my talk about Large Scale Migration from MySQL to PostgreSQL has been selected! This talk shares hindsights about the why and the how of that migration, what problems couldn’t be solved without moving away and how the solution now looks.