/ blogPGConf.EU 2024 in Athens, Extension Summit, OpenStreetMap talk, and others
This year, the 14th annual PostgreSQL Conference Europe (PGConf.EU for short) took place from October 22nd to October 25th in the historic city of Athens, Greece, featuring awesome content and awesome Mediterranean weather.
It was my honour to serve on the organising committee, alongside Andreas Scherbaum, Chris Ellis, Dave Page, Ilya Kosmodemiansky, Karen Jex, Magnus Hagander, Tomas Vondra, and Valeria Kaplan. More details on everyone who helped out with running the conference can be found here on postgres-contrib.org.
On October 22nd, before the main conference, there was a full day of training delivered by expert PostgreSQL professionals, and also new and exciting fringe events took place.
One was the inaugural meeting of the PostgreSQL Europe Diversity Committee that I was privileged to attend, chaired by the force of nature that is Karen Jex. Goals, plans and benchmarks were set in a kick-off session that's very promising for the future. The first early results of the initiative were already visible before the meeting, with the achievement of the greatest percentage of female speakers yet at a PGConf.EU. The diversity pinboard in the main conference hallway was a great success and it was very heartening to receive all your messages of encouragement and support.
The PostgreSQL Extension Ecosystem Summit also took place on that day, sponsored by Tembo, Percona, Xata and Timescale, and organized by Floor Drees and David Wheeler. I was invited to speak about the extension I maintain, pg_statviz so I shared some backstory, details and insights. I find that the current effort to revitalise and strengthen extension building for Postgres is hugely important, and fully support the initiative.
The main conference was kicked off on the 23rd with Stacey Haysler's keynote address "The PostgreSQL License Fee" (video here), where it was explained how the PostgreSQL Project works, why you don't have to pay a license fee, and how the contributors (and their employers) are the main driving force behind the project.
The number of attendees again broke all records with 755 checked-in and confirmed to be in attendance!
My talk at the conference was "–Mom, can we have G＊＊gle Maps? –We have G＊＊gle Maps at home" and dealt with the awesome GIS combo of the PostgreSQL database, PostGIS extension, and OpenStreetMap data. You can watch the recording below (slides here).
Video on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=l6hbzYJ0jJU
You can find all the brilliant talks presented at the conference here, with links to their slides contained within each schedule entry, and also all the video recordings from the confrence here. I myself have a lot of video catching-up to do as my duties at the conference meant I could only attend a select number of talks.
As a token of our appreciation, speakers and volunteers received this awesome little hand-made and hand-painted Greek amphora!
PGConf.EU Athens 2024 was awesome in no small part due to the amazing PostgreSQL Community. As always, I wish there was more time to meet more of you, but we can always do this at the next Postgres event. Many thanks to all the committees, volunteers, sponsors, speakers and attendees that helped make this conference a reality.