Venezuela FOSS Forum; LPI certification; miscelanea

People,

As the subject says, I just got back from Venezuela. I was invited to
'represent Postgres' at the "1st Worldwide Forum on Free Technology" (free
translation from "Primer Foro Mundial de Tecnologia Libre"),
http://www.tecnologialibre.org.

The Forum was organized because the Venezuela government is trying to
get out of the commercial software world as quickly as possible. Note
that "government" here includes PDVSA, the oil company. There's a lot
of local knowledge and some very good experiences using free software,
so they want to make the most of it.

I gave a technical talk which I felt awkward, because most other talks
were of a more philosophical or ideological nature (R. Stallman was
there, for instance). At mine there wasn't a lot of questions, and
after the talk was finished there wasn't much people coming to me to ask
random things. It all was strange to me because usually there's a lot
of both newbie and advanced questions at the talk, and a flood of people
coming to me to ask things and chat after the talk is finished.

But in the end I noticed that there is a lot of people, mostly coming
from an Oracle background, that wants to migrate to something else.
Apparently some of them are convinced that Postgres is for them. They
want training, certification, documentation, support; and of course,
they want it all in spanish. I feel there's an important market here to
be exploited; and having PDVSA among them, there's also probably a lot
of money to be spent.

Thanks to Adi Alurkar of SourceForge fame, I had the opportunity to talk
to Glenn McKnight of LPI (Linux Professional Institute). They say that
there's a definite chance to build a Postgres certification exam that
the LPI could administrate (right verb?). I don't have the slightest
idea on certifications, so there wasn't much which I could ask about;
but there seem to be a lot of people here interested in having a
community certification program and this seems an interesting way to
build it.

As a unrelated note, I was asked to stay an extra week to help a company
that was having problems with their Postgres platform. They had big
problems because the server went down everyday at 3.00am, so they were
losing confidence on Postgres. They had offers to migrate to a commercial
database, and apparently they were about to give up. I found a lot of
misconceptions, bad DB design, badly written code, on which I gave
advise on how to fix. They found out that configuring Postgres
appropiately the server wouldn't go down; that by rewriting queries, the
reports would run faster; and by restructuring PHP code, it would be
more readable and maintanable. Probably nothing that any of you doesn't
know, but they are now very happy with free software in general and
Postgres in particular. They accepted my petition to be a success case
study, so I think they will be one of the first to be published in the
spanish community site.

In conclusion, I think it was a fruitful trip, and with luck, we will
continue working with them and maybe we'll convince them to sponsor some
development, documentation translation, or otherwise useful things for
the community at large.

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"Right now the sectors on the hard disk run clockwise, but I heard a rumor that
you can squeeze 0.2% more throughput by running them counterclockwise.
It's worth the effort. Recommended." (Gerry Pourwelle)