PGDay.IT 2011 was “bellissimo”!

The fifth edition of the Italian PGDay went well beyond our initial expectations. We had about 75 participants, a total of 95 people including staff and speakers.
As I said during the event, rather than PGDay Italy, this should be named PGDay for Italian speakers given the presence of staff from Switzerland (Canton Ticino). Participants came from 12 regions: all regions but Val d’Aosta in the north/centre area, but also from Southern Italy (Naples and Calabria).

In any case, it was fantastic to get back to Prato after 3 years, in the
Monash  University Prato Centre. The atmosphere was very similar to the
first editions and we are really happy to see the community grow (last
year we had 60 participants in total, which means an increment of 60%).
Even the quality of the talks was in my humble opinion very high.
The audience paid a tribute to Magnus Hagander for his nomination in the
core team, then Magnus wonderfully covered the new features of
PostgreSQL 9.1.

Simon Riggs talks were on the future of PostgreSQL and on NoSQL
databases. Very interesting. Andreas Scherbaum covered data warehouse
topics.
Other interesting talks were:

•  the experience on open source and Postgres for CSI Piemonte, one of the main organisations working for local governments
• ORM and Perl by Ferruccio Zamuner
• Node.js and Postgres by Lucio Granzi
• Serialisable snapshot isolation, covered by Marco Nenciarini
• repmgr by Carlo Ascani
• foreign tables and data wrappers by Giulio Calacoci

Unfortunately I missed Gianni’s talk on debugging with CTEs as I was
giving my speech on the project we (as 2ndQuadrant Italia) have been
working in the last months: BaRMan, backup and recovery manager for PostgreSQL.
The feedback I received was excellent (especially by certified Oracle
engineers). We hope we can release it by the end of 2011 (depending on
sponsorships) or, at the latest, early 2012.

In any case, even though organising this kind of events as community
is not an easy task, the success of this edition is a source of
motivation for all of us. We hope we can start much earlier with the
organisation and we hope we can find more sponsors/partners for next
year.

I take the opportunity to thank all the speakers that took part to
PGDay and all the staff members: Diego, Luca, Gianluca, Cosimo,
Maurizio, Marco (Tofanari), Emanuele and the team from 2ndQuadrant
Italia (Carlo, Giulio, Marco, Gianni and Simone).