PgDay France 2016

31 May 2016 – http://pgday.fr/

PgDay France was a well attended conference with more than 140 attendees, with many presentations from PostgreSQL users further demonstrating just how popular PostgreSQL is now.

It was good to see a large well organized conference in Lille, the “capital of Northern France”. Lille is an industrial hub and university town, with an airport to give access to rest of Europe. Fast rail links with London, as well as Brussels and Paris, allowed me to attend easily. I’d not been there before, but I’ll be making sure to go back for a better visit.

As we should expect, the conference was in French language, a challenge for me I admit, but I was able to follow most of the presentations. Parlée lentement, je peux comprendre parfois.

I arrived just after lunch, to catch the last 5 presentations. The first of those was a talk about transformational change and technical migration from Oracle to PostgreSQL, which seems to be happening everywhere.

Vincent Picavet gave a good talk about PostGIS. Forgive me, but the best part of this talk was where he demonstrated an analogue clock written using PostgreSQL/PostGIS with the hands of the clock as geometry objects. Fantastic!

Next a speaker from Meteo France spoke about their very large meteorological databases. I was happy to hear that he thanked 2ndQuadrant Support, especially Cedric Villemain, who I know had worked hard to make their implementation successful. Interesting talk.

A good technical presentation about BRIN indexes in 9.5 by Adrien Nayrat showed me that 2ndQuadrant’s contributions are beginning to be understood and appreciated across a wide audience. I didn’t have anything to add, though Vincent reminded me over a coffee that the recent additions that allow BRIN indexes to work with PostGIS (by Giuseppe Broccolo) were very important. We spoke a little about future developments in that area.

Last up, Cedric Villemain’s talk about Logical Replication and pglogical raised many questions which a group of us discussed over dinner later than evening. Lots of interest there, but still many misunderstandings we can correct over time.

“https://www.2ndquadrant.com/fr/resources/pglogical/ and https://www.2ndquadrant.com/resources/pglogical/

The conference ended with a pleasant soiree to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the PostgreSQL project. Thanks very much to the French PostgreSQL Association for the invitation to dinner afterwards. Great event, merci beaucoup.