OSCon.2k5.4.Recap

Wow, yesterday was quite the busy day. Swung in to the keynotes a little late, but managed to catch the talks on [http://www.langorigami.com/art/whatsnew/whatsnew.php4 computational oragami] and identity 2.0, both of which were pretty darn cool. One thing about O’Reilly Keynotes is that even if they don’t sound interesting the almost always are. Next up was my talk, which I was a little concerned about because in my earlier run throughs was always very tight on the 45 minute time frame. I tried to start a little early but a few stragglers coming late kind of nixed that, and then about 20 minutes into the talk one of the orielly tech guys came in and started fiddling with the projector, which wouldnt have been so bad except he kept asking me questions about my setup… how crazy. I’ll admit he did improve the setup somewhat, but where was he the 10-15 minutes before the talk when I was setting up? So I ended up running out of time before I could get to the practical application portion of my talk, I guess I should have just skipped over more stuff to get to that :- Actually I was talking with someone afterwords and they thought you could probably turn it into an even longer db admin course if you added information on vacuum and analyze and some stuff on the statistics target. After that swing in and out of a number of talks, spent some time at the postgresql booth, and talked to the apress books some more. Apress is really excited about PostgreSQL right now, which is refreshing compared to folks like orielly, who seemed to be more my$ql focused. The two highlights of the afternoon talks were the pg built your car talk, which was pretty packed, and discuseed moving from oracle to pg. The other was the last few minutes of the pg/windows talk by pervasive, where they showed how to do failover on windows… pretty neat, link to follow once I track it down. A bunch of us went on to burgerville for dinner. It was described to me as if you forced a gormet chef to work at mcdonalds, you would get burgerville… this wasnt a bad description. We then came back for the postgresql bof, which was interesting to see more new users and a number of folks interested in moving over. We did kind of a round table discussion, which was a nice format. After that was bizsgress/kettle/jasper bof, which was interesting for folks doing data warehousing. The main point for me was that there are now some good tools for doing reporting against pg, something that was not true 1-2 years ago. Once that ended was really tired, so I swung back to the house and crashed. More to follow tommorrow, including some bric stuff and an osdl trip… should be fun.