Tag Archives: conference

Swiss pgday 2018


The cool thing about zooming out… is that your world appears to get bigger.
Being personally now no longer bound to Oracle, having the opportunity to work with PostgreSQL, also gives the opportunity to go new places and explore new possibilities. One of the cooler things is: participating in Postgres conferences.

Conference vibe

Where Oracle conferences, although having some deep technical aspects, tend to lean towards the business aspects of technology, especially today with Cloud first / Cloud only… PostgreSQL conferences tend to lean towards engineering. What things are we – that same Postgres community – building in and around Postgres. What do we think about these developments and how can we improve them.
Postgres tends to have anywhere from 5 to 10 different directions in which the product is being developed. Lots of people check, test, improve, criticize and comment on all these developments.
A significant difference, somehow.
The atmosphere at PostgreSQL conferences, though is also simply super cool. New people to meet, new ways to incorporate.

Swiss pgday

I had the opportunity to join and participate in the Swiss pgday (find the program here) in the beautiful town of Rapperswil, at the university of applied science (HSR). Together with my friend and colleague, Postgres founding core team member, Mr. Bruce Momjian, I joined the event.
The Swiss Postgres community booked a nice result with a 30% higher number of participants. In two tracks, over 12 talks were delivered by local and international speakers on many aspects of Postgres, from a more business perspective on Postgres to the new things that come with Postgres 11, and can now be tested by anyone who wants to!

With all these shifting panels, with this second wave of Open Source rolling, that is now happening… More intricate systems, like relational database management systems, are now being offered and adopted.
It makes sense to zoom out as the opportunities increase so rapidly and in ways never foreseen.

I challenge and invite you all; come on board and ride this wave with us.


PGConf.EU, Postgres Rocks!!

On a rainy Tuesday morning we set off on a Polish Airlines flight to Warsaw.
Our target: PGConf.EU with some of the biggest crew EnterpriseDB ever sent off.
Our goal: spread the love of EDB within the PostgreSQL community, where EDB is such an intrinsic part of.

The evening before the conference promises to be an interesting one. We have rented off the Hard rock Cafe in Downtown Warsaw for the kickoff of our European Tour. During this tour we will visit Hard rock Cafes throughout Europe to talk about the future of Postgres.
With 80 people present, our space at the Cafe was a full house! With food and drinks it was a perfect place for networking and sharing stories about Postgres. After the drinks, Warsaw city tour-guides took us on a walking sightseeing tour through the city. This inevitably led us to Vodka and Herring, which formed the crown on the day.

For me personally it was the perfect opportunity to submerge myself in the Postgres community, feel the energy and meet some of the leading names like Bruce Momjian, Dave Page, Robert Haas, Andreas Scherbaum, (“Blame”) Magnus Hagander and many, many more.

Second day in Warsaw, first day of PGConf.EU. The EDB crew slept well and is ready to roll!
At the EDB stand we are hosting a quiz where participants can contest to actually win an electric guitar and free access to one year of on-line Postgres training. The challenge: by means of speed and correctness answer 11 questions on PostgreSQL!
In a busy and energetic there are loads of very good sessions going down, making hard to single out the sessions to follow…

The second day of PGConf.EU continues the flow of excellent talks and fierce competition at our Postgres Rocks Quiz. EDB Postgres Experts are sharing their knowledge abundantly at this conference.
Day two also is my presenting debut at a Postgres-conference. Together with friend and partner in crime Daniel Westermann of DBI-services. Our talk was well received and we were able to share some of our experiences of entering the PostgreSQL world, coming from Oracle.
EDB concluded the second day of PGConf.EU with a team-dinner in the heart of Warsaw. A unique opportunity to bring all the facets of EnterpriseDB togehter. This ranges from our community foundation to our strategic business vision, all together in one place to exchange ideas and enjoy good company over a very good meal.

As with all good things, we inevitably reach the closing day, no difference there for PGConf.EU!
More excellent talks on general Postgres development and the influence of various projects on the future of the leading Open Source database project.

We also had a very exciting final to our EDB Postgres Quiz, with a surprise victory for Rafal Hawrylak of TomTom and an excellent runner up Matthijs v/d Vleuten of Hendrikx ITC.

 

On behalf of the entire EnterpriseDB, I would like to thank the PostgreSQL conference board for an excellent experience in Warsaw!

Live free or die!!


If you like to relive pgconfeu, simply review the comprehensive tweet-timeline.

Birth of a user group conference…

Or, how post-conference blues hit.

Seeding

You don’t actually get to witness these kinds of things to often. Yes, there was the birth of POUG conference, the passionate work of Kamil Stawiarski and the people he gathered around him. He did an awesome job and pulled it off.
Why then is this so special? Well, first of all because it is my native conference. People that have contributed for many years, working closely together with new members to create something new. I think it is kinda special.
Richard Olrichs, Ise Douwes, Luc Bors and Bart van de Laar formed the team that pulled it of! Kudos to them.

Work started already end of 2016… on the notion that this conference was being organized, there was a small Twitter bombardment to recruit as many of the interesting international speakers to come and join us. This helped create a fabulous agenda, covering 81 (!!) sessions and 3 keynotes over 2 days in the spectacular setting of “De Rijtuigenloods” in Amersfoort.

Importance for NL

We have (finally) done it! The Netherlands have experienced their very first Full Stack Oracle Conference ever! I have said this many times before, and I will say this probably many times again, this is so very important for the spread of knowledge, the exchange of experiences and cross-pollination between countries!
We have never done this before… We have APEX World, which is, of course, super important! And we have SIGs, which are very important for people working within a specialization. All good, all very important! But our business is way to specialized already. If you never take the time to look over your boundaries to what your colleague is doing (for which you don’t have time on a day-to-day basis) you’ll get isolated and miss out on possible great idea’s, changes and inspiration. For this alone, events like these are so important. For a country / region (as we span Benelux) that is so active in IT, it is a nuisance to have to go to either the UK or to Germany to experience a conference like this.

It is _that_ important…

One personal thing… nl.OUG (this is the brand new name for OGh, which also symbolizes a new start to me) focus on talks on (end-) user experience, in effect, partners with end-users coming to share project briefs… Good in itself, but not what I would applaud as main focus. These conferences – to me – are about learning and the best learning comes from professionals sharing either best practices or telling about technical implementations of technique. These stories are obviously always very welcome, but are no main focus…

My personal experiences

— International scene

As an active member of the Oracle community, I tend to know a number of people, spread out over this globe. One of the joys of a general conference is the fact that many of these people also participate. This leads to many happy encounters. With Oren Nakdimon from Israel, to Sandra Flores from Mexico, with Tim Hall, aka. Oracle Base, Maria Colgan & Brendan Tierney and therefor with Chris Saxon, more than 2rds of the Ask TOM-team!! And even many more famous speakers from home and abroad. It was a very special feeling to meet all these beautiful people on my home turf!

— Followed sessions

I didn’t get to follow many sessions, partly because of the many people I met and wanted to catch up with and partly because of, well, other responsibilities…
And perhaps a bit because of the fact that the ratio between serial sessions and parallel sessions was a bit off.
I did get to see:
The keynote by Maria Colgan highlighting the many things you can do with an Oracle database
Investigating the performance of a statement via the SQL Monitor report by Toon Koppelaars, which is always insightful!
Moving Oracle data in real-time – The 3 fundamental principles of Oracle replication by Jakub Sjeba from Dbvisit, which proved to be an excellent basis for my own session, later that day
Blockchain on the Oracle Cloud, the next big thing by Robert van Mölken, who helped me understand the technical side of the Blockchain technology.
It’s a wrap by Lucas Jellema, who did a great job at really zooming out and looking at the bigger picture.

— My sessions

I had the lucky opportunity to present even 2 sessions in Amersfoort.
Migrating your Oracle database with almost zero downtime
and
Comparing PostgreSQL to Oracle

Both sessions were well attended and interactive. I enjoyed it very much and, judging from the reactions and interactions, I guess the attendees too. Thank you for attending!!
Obviously I am happy to see the uptake of PostgreSQL and EDB Postgres in the Benelux. As said with “horses for courses”, Oracle has it’s playing-field, but so does PostgreSQL, and probably bigger than it is today 🙂

And now, the future…

This was 2017, this was the kick-off, the very first one.
With the buzz and with the post-conference blues…

It now is time to look to 2018, start preparing. Gathering lessons learned, inventorise feedback and make plans.
Whatever the outcome, there can only be 1 plan! “nl.OUGTech18″ or “Tech Experience 2018” we need to make sure the messages reaches further and wider.
With over 250 attendees for a first event, we aim for over 500 for the next event. There are more than enough potential participants in our region to pull this of.
The basic structure is there, the first succes is there, let’s do this!!

See you all next year!!
(or hopefully sooner)