I wrote up some quick notes from talks and conversations over at the Emma Tech blog.

The most exciting talk I sat in today so far was about an Oracle PL/SQL to Postgres PL/PgSQL translation tool that I’m hoping the company who created it will open source. We’ll see. Fortunately, a fellow conference-goer had an inspirational story to share about open sourcing another tool for Postgres, which meant incredible adoption in just a few months in our community.

Not every project will see that kind of immediate benefit and growth from open sourcing, but there is a certain class of project – where most people can complete 80% of a useful tool, but don’t bother to put in the additional effort to get the remaining 20% of the features that they’d really like to have.

But, when someone does finally release a tool that provides that extra 20% of features, adopting the new tool is a no-brainer.. particularly if it is open source. I think this PL/SQL conversion tool falls into this sweet spot.

Now I’m sitting in the Foreign Data Wrappers talk and very excited to see what Andrew is announcing. Great to see people creating things that make the crowd here clap, smile and celebrate.