Re: Linux World experiences

Elein,

First off, when can we expect the OSCON report on GB?

> Comments on the BOF and our visibility and
> your experiences at LW are what I'm looking for.
> Just a line or two--longer if you are inspired.

Well, for my part let me say that I would *not* like to do 2 conventions
back-to-back again. It makes it very hard to prepare for LWE-SF. However,
I think that overall it was very good for us and gave helped us in pushing
significantly heightened presence in the OSS world.

Let me thank all of the volunteers who pitched in on this one, most especially
David Fetter who drove up from Palo Alto at 70mph when I had to take a client
emergency, and Roman, Myra and Githogori who all helped out despite never
having been to an SFPUG event before.

As a special delight, a woman from the Japan PostgreSQL User's Group attended
the conference and worked two shifts with us at the booth. Since we had 2
Japanese companies send reps over on Thursday morning, this was very useful!

We gave out between 700 and 800 CDs by 4pm Wednesday afternoon, meaning that
we probably talked to 400 to 500 people (some people just grabbed and ran).
Probably the best part of doing this show was meeting all of the people who
use PG but don't speak up on the mailing lists; some of the uses to which our
database is put are fascinating. For example, we found out that the
Venezuelan government uses PostgreSQL in some departments.

The BOF on Wednesday night had 25 to 40 attendees. I briefly went over some
of the expected features in 8.0, and then Mark Wong of OSDL went over their
current project testing PostgreSQL on Linux against TPC-style workloads.
For example, Mark revealed that using the new Tablespaces patch for 8.0 to
put all of the major tables and logs of a database on seperate volumes (in a
42-disk machine) could boost performance by 13%. He also did a comparison
of filesystems.

After the presentation, we had a general discussion about 8.0, performance,
and PostgreSQL PR.

> I'm also accepting any photographs of people
> at the booth. (Just email them.)

Nope, these got killed by my camera as well.

--
-Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco