PgCon was a very exciting conference, with a lot of people from Europe, Asia, Australia and South America traveling to be part of it. I read that 175 people attended, and based on how crowded both parties were, it’s not hard to believe!

The biggest announcement for me was that the PostgreSQL Europe is finally a non-profit organization! I made a slide for my lightning talk with Magnus, Gabriele, Jean-Paul and Andreas on it:

I got a ton of great feedback about the User Groupalooza slides. I also enjoyed meeting Jean-Paul Argudo, a fellow Drupaler.

There were a bunch of community-focused conversations, some focused inward on developers, some looking out to the rest of the world from inside Pg, and others from the outside looking in:

• Bruce Momjian’s Keynote – Bruce looked at the future of Pg development from the perspective of a 12-year veteran. This was an inspirational talk, and many people referenced his thoughts throughout the rest of the conference.
• Andrew Sullivan’s Pg Project management – Andrew started a conversation among Pg developers about how development is *supposed* to happen, how it actually happens, and what the dev community might do to change things or leave them as they are
• Susanne Ebrecht’s talk on what PostgreSQL could learn from MySQL
• Lightning Talks – I did the lightning talk on User Groups
• Peter Eisenstraut’s talk on Release Management. This talk was a lot about the infrastructure and an overview of how the project manages software releases. It included a list of active developers, overview of what -core actually does, and descriptions of various duties people are performing to maintain postgresql.org and the associated services.

All the talks were recorded, so I look forward to listening to them again – without the distraction of Twitter! 🙂

A couple talks I thought were really great for web developers were:

• Magnus Hagander’s search.postgresql.org talk gave some great examples and code showing how to use PostgreSQL’s tsearch capabilities with a PHP-based website.
• Clark Evan’s talk on HTSQL, a REST-ful web inteface application. It looks pretty cool and I’m interested in trying it out. They are using it for medical records report generation and have even given the ability to generate queries to the end users.

Thanks so much to Dan who got me to the conference this year! I learned a lot, and really enjoyed meeting so many people that I’ve only communicated with over email for the past three years.