LinuxTag account

LinuxTag ended on Saturday. The PostgreSQL booth was staffed by Jeroen
Vermeulen, Bruce Momjian, Andreas Pflug, Cornelia Boenigk, and myself.
The attendance (16175 this year) was down a bit because they moved the
show from Thu-Sun to Wed-Sat, but that way we had more "enterprise"
visitors and less souvenir hunters. Among the former group most people
knew about PostgreSQL and used it or were just about to switch to it
from Informix. Among the latter group we had about half asking the
usual "so how does this compare to MySQL". The asked-for features were
mostly related to high availability, but that problem is solved, so
we're in good shape. The real killer question, however, was how to
replace MS Access. No, OpenOffice is not the answer yet.

I held a presentation in the conference program about the upcoming
features in 7.5, which was well-received. To distinguish the talk from
the immediately preceding talk from the "Ministry of Announcements"
(quote Andreas) I was able to point out that the features I talked
about actually already exist in CVS. I stayed to hear Brian Aker talk
about MySQL Replication and Clustering and had a good laugh. Wisely,
they didn't put his slides on the conference DVD, otherwise anyone
would have figured out after a short while that these people are
completely insane. If anyone finds those slides, we should put them
into the Amusements section on our web site.

I will put up some pictures later in the week.

The next PostgreSQL event in Europe that I know of is LinuxWorld
Conference and Expo in Frankfurt, October 26 to 28.