Čtvrtek červenec 20, 2006

PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit

PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit performed in Toronto from 8th and 9th July 2006. This summit was the first occasion to meeting postgres hacker face to face in its ten years history like opensource and free project. The conference unofficially started day before on 7th July evening with small refreshment in the hotel lobby. Many people met first time and everybody tried to assigned mailing address to real person. It was a little bit funny. I met with my Indian colleague Dhanaraj in hotel day before, but I have never seen my US colleagues. For example Jim's photo is little bit out of date. Fortunately, Jim identified us. The all group of hacker moved to boat for dinner and for ongoing person identification and unlimited discussion about postgres.

Toronto evening

Main conference started on Saturday morning by Josh Berkus. He invited all conference participant and said thanks to conference sponsors. Sun was one of them. After this he gave floor to Bruce Momjian. Bruce is one of people who ware presented releasing of postgres source code ten years ago. He talked what happened during this time.

Next presentations had been divided to two separate tracks. Many of presentation ware related to present new projects. Korry Douglas showed PL/SQL debugger based on postgres proxy server which is stored close to main server. Communication is based on standard plsql protocol and debugger features are implemented as standard stored functions. Simon Riggs continued with presentation about performance problems. However, some problem generated big discussion and unfortunately, Simon did not have time to finished his all presentation.

Saturday afternoon was dedicated to Neil Conway's and Gavin Sherri's introduction to postgres hacking. It was very useful practical presentation based on real feature implementation.

Contributors dinner was closing Saturday. I met and talked with many people. I spoke with Luke Lonergan, CTO of GreenPlum company, about ZFS and its scalability. He connected from his PDA to his home server and shown me version of running opensolaris. Yes, My OpenSolaris T-Shirt identified me and many people ask me about our postgres support and future strategy. Many people trust us but not all of them. I spoke with Skype developers from Estonia. I asked them if they plan skype version for solaris. Unfortunately, no. They have version for linux, but they afraid that sound subsystem is different on solaris and is not easy to port skype on solaris. I'm not solaris sound guru, but if anybody interesting in it, I have a their email addresses. The local band interrupted all discussions and I went to the hotel.

Second day was opened by Robert Lor and his famous D-Trace presentation. Robert shown only part of D-Trace capabilities, but it was enough to persuade community. Community have accepted D-Trace and it will be implemented in the postgres 8.2. Andrew Dunstan presented buildfarm framework status and its problems and their solution. However, some buildfarm problems are still opened and is need of more investigation. Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev spoke about new features and improvements in the T-Search 2 project (full text search) and shown a big TODO list as well.

Robert Lor

Sunday lunch I spent in Elephant pub on Yonge Street (longest street in the World). Bruce with his colleague came little bit later into this pub and Bruce invited me to join the lunch with them. Yes, really I had a lunch with Bruce Momjiam. You can see it on picture below. I asked him about future of his TODO list, if there are any plans to replace this TODO list by some bug tracking system. He answered that there were many discussion about it but all bug tracking system is too complicated for postgres purpose and hackers using primary mails for solving problem and there no exist any relevant system integrated it.

Me and Bruce

Peter Eisentraut and Josh Berkus closed the conference and all attendants went to take group photo.

And what is conclusion? Italy won World Championship in Football (for US citizens soccer :-). And conference had big success and big benefit for all attendants. Interest of this conference was three time bigger than available capacity. We can expect that next conference will be early maybe next year. I'm looking forward to it.