The first PostgreSQL Conference Europe talks!

The first round of PostgreSQL Conference Europe talks have now been selected and already it's shaping up to be a great conference if these are any to go by. You can see the list so far at http://www.postgresql.eu/events/sessions/pgconfeu2011/.

If we take a brief look at a few of the talks, you'll see that you really don't want to miss this year's line-up.

Firstly we have a talk by PostgreSQL veteran and core team member Bruce Momjian who will be "Explaining the Postgres Query Optimizer". This will enlighten attendees as to how PostgreSQL makes its decisions in response to queries which is important to understand in order to know how best to ask PostgreSQL what you want. Bruce gave a very popular MVCC talk last year, and no doubt this one will be one to watch.

Also, Michael Meskes's talk entitled "Mission impossible? Can I replace my most important databases with PostgreSQL?" won't be a brief "yes", but will elaborate on Michael's experience with over 12 years of using open source in business, and how to make migrations work. He'll also provide some real life examples of the benefits which have been realised over the years.

And you'll also get the chance to attend the "Synchronous Replication and Durability Tuning" talk by Simon Riggs, who developed the synchronous replication functionality, and Greg Smith, who wrote the book on PostgreSQL performance. No really, he did. In this talk Simon and Greg will go through how synchronous replication works in PostgreSQL 9.1, what considerations should be taken into account, and typical performance users of this feature can expect. Then they will cover how to go about improving performance for this particular set up.

We don't just have talks though, there are also training sessions available, and in addition to the ones previously announced we now also have "Streaming replication, hot standby and synchronous replication" by Redpill Linpro's own Magnus Hagander. There's also "Hands-On with PostGIS" by Vincent Picavet, a GIS specialist who's providing training on behalf of Dalibo. Go check out the complete list at http://2011.pgconf.eu/training/.

These talks shown so far are just the start. At the time of writing this we have confirmed about 15 talks (probably more as you read this), but there will be many many more, so keep your eye on the conference website and subscribe to the conference Twitter feed for the latest updates. And get don't forget to make your booking for training sessions in advance as there are a limited number of allocations for each class.