79 real attendees at the Italian PGDay

The sixth edition of the Italian PGDay took place in Prato at the Monash University Centre last Friday, November 23rd.

As president of the Italian PostgreSQL Users Group (most likely for the last time) and host of Prato, I had the pleasure to open the event and welcome all the attendees – coming from 11 regions of Italy. 79 real attendees (PostgreSQL users and potential ones), plus 16 among speakers and staf, for a total of 95 participants. It is a remarkable result for such a specific open source advocacy event!

95% of the attendees were from the central and northern parts of the peninsula, 4% of them from the southern part.

Organising a PGDay is always a tiring activity. However, it can be very rewarding too. Especially if you see that every year, more and more people are getting closer to PostgreSQL.
Our role as PostgreSQL advocates, is to let them know what Postgres is already capable of doing so that they can evaluate its usage from a strategic point of view in their organisation.
I was particularly happy with my talks on migrations from Oracle (a lot of public administrations in Italy are forced to take this into consideration and need to be reassured, not only from a technical point of view), very large databases and business continuity.
The latter one is probably my favourite topic of the moment, especially due to the role that Barman is slowly acquiring in the Postgres eco-system.

I’d like to thank everyone at ITPUG, all the volunteers that gave a bit of their time to assist visitors and to help them before, during and after the event.

A few things I’d like to see more next year:

• more international speakers (even though this proves that the level of Italian speakers is high);
• more tutorials and introductory talks – maybe over two days;
• more social events, including a concert: the Florentine steak was awesome (ask Simon, even though he may have preferred it “more” cooked), with almost 30 attendees, as well as the beers offered by our sponsor Interlogica.

Finally, I’d like to thank the Monash University Prato Centre, for their services and the location – which seems to follow PostgreSQL’s steps and improve every year.

So, I hope to see you next year!