PostgreSQL @ FOSDEM 2011

I returned from Brussels with Dave Page yesterday where I attended FOSDEM. It was my first time at this event and had a great time. Loads of organisations were represented there including Mozilla (promoting Firefox), LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Debian, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, FreeBSD, Perl, FSFE, Mandriva, Gnome, KDE, CentOS, CAcert, and many others.

And of course, PostgreSQL, where I was helping out, selling various items and talking to people about Postgres itself. All the plush blue elephants were sold (and there were quite a lot), all the stress balls sold, many t-shirts and backpacks sold, and all the pins and pens were given away too. In fact the last pin was taken by a friendly Monty Widenius (creator MySQL and now MariaDB) which he put on there and then. Perl, who were our next-door neighbours, bought one of the plush PostgreSQL elephants and placed it atop their massive Perl camel, which we then declared made it pl/Perl. And one person even bought a batch of 100 stress balls which were placed in a PostgreSQL backpack for him to carry them off with. We also introduced a promotion which stated that if you could prove that you're an Oracle employee, you got a stress ball completely free of charge. Sadly no-one took us up on that offer.

Unfortunately I didn't make it to many talks. I only attended three which were Heikki Linnakangas from EnterpriseDB talking about creating custom data types and operators in PostgreSQL, Tatsuo Ishii from SRA OSS Inc introducing pgPool II version 3, and Damien Clochard of Dalibo explaining PGXN. I had hoped to make it to at least one of the LibreOffice talks and get to talk to their guys at the booth, but didn't get round to it, and there was also a talk from folk at Sirius about open source software and whether the UK government is backing it, which I had hoped to see but was too late for. But the whole thing was a complete geek-fest, and I'd definitely want to go again.