Postgres Open 2012, Chicago

It all started with me and Amit submitting our proposals for talks for Postgres Open on the last day, perhaps last minute of submission. We sent one proposal each for the talk and one combined proposal for tutorial. While doing that we had PGCon experience in mind. The Postgres-XC team submitted two proposals for talks and one for tutorial to PGCon. Against our hopes, the tutorial got accepted and not the talks. For Postgres Open we hoped that at least the tutorial would get accepted. But to our surprise , both the talks got accepted. Crossing hurdles like last minute budgetary approvals, US (many stars around that word) VISA, we finally booked tickets for our trip on the eleventh hour. There was Postgres-XC core team meeting to be held in Dubai from 11th to 13th September. Postgres Open was being held from 17th to 19th September, following the meeting in Dubai. Since the formalities for US trip were completed at the last hour, I had no option but to have these trips as Pune - Mumbai - Dubai - Mumbai - Chicago - Mumbai - Pune way. That was bound to be very hectic, and we were preparing mentally and physically. The Dubai trip went smooth. On the way to Chicago, the three hour halt at Abu-dhabi airport was horrible. The lobby hosting gates 28 to 41 is too small and lacks enough facilities. There was a long queue to enter the gate 28 for boarding Chicago flight. The gate didn't have enough seating capacity and many of the passengers were standing and waiting post-security check. (Advice: If you have a halt at Abu Dhabi don't rush to gates 28-41.) Barring this uncomfortable situation, rest of the journey went well. Abu-dhabi to Chicago segment was comfortable irrespective of the 15 hour duration.

The conference was to be held at Westin Michigan Avenue Chicago. The hotel is placed in excellent location in downtown Chicago, few minutes away on foot from the Michigan lake shore with two beaches nearby and Navy Pier. It has a couple of eateries around it, noticeably "The Cheesecake Factory", "Ghirardelli" outlets and a break-fast outlet, of which I have forgot the name .Tom, Robert, Gabrielle, Bruce, Amit, Vibhor and me participated from EnterpriseDB. The conference started with an excellent key-note by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. In his key-note he emphasized that the next generation databases ought to be Post-SQL databases (not NoSQL) where prefix "Post" implied the databases after the SQL era. He explained the desired characteristics of such a database and mentioned that PostgreSQL is a candidate to be such a database.

There were three tracks and my presentation was scheduled in the first slot after the key-note on the first date. The response was overwhelming; the room was full and there were people standing at the back. There were quite a few questions during the presentation, but I managed to finish it within time. The questions covered broader areas like fault tolerance, HA, HA using replicated tables etc. People appreciated the scalability shown by Postgres-XC and also the fact that it's API compliant with PostgreSQL, implying that applications can migrate with very little changes to Postgres-XC from PostgreSQL. The presence at the talk showed that more and more users are getting interested in Postgres-XC. Hopefully, we will see such overwhelming adoption as well.

I attended few presentations and few private meetings. The topics covered HA, 9.2 features and enhancements, logging and backup, migration to PostgreSQL, experiences with PostgreSQL, scalability  etc. The quality and content of the talks was generally good. The audience was from varied background although a lot of them came from StateFarm. Heroku and 2ndQuadrant threw parties on the evening of 18th and 19th respectively. I liked the conference badge. It was a small booklet with schedule in it and a map of the venue of evening parties. One could just open the booklet to find the schedule and decide which talk to attend without much hassle. Generally, I do not like to wear conference badges, but this time, I wore it all the time, even outside the conference venue because of the map it contained.

Me presenting about Postgres-XC

Attendees at the start of the presentation

Amit, reading the schedule from his badge

Conference badge with my name on it

Hancock tower from the shores of the Michigan lake 

On last day, I was feeling tired, I didn't do much sigh-seeing. I had a trip to Navy Pier and the walked and visited places along the Michigan lake shore. I spent an hour at the beach, listening to the sound of waves, an amazing experience, possibly the best hour that I spent in Chicago.