JDLL Lyon 14 & 15 oct : we were there

Hi all,

Last 14 and 15 of october, we were at the "Les VIIèmes Journées du Logiciel
Libre" (the 7th Free Software days) in Lyon, France. (Website (fr only):
http://www.aldil.org/agenda/journees/2005/)

We were 3 of the PostgreSQLFr non profit organization there
(www.PostgreSQLFr.org) in a booth (a table and 3 chairs):
- Thomas Silvi
- Guillaume Lelarge
- me

Here are some pictures of that event:

http://www.traduc.org/~gleu/jdll2005/index.html

It's easy to find us on the pictures, we were wearing beautyfull blue elephants
on our tshirts (thanks to those (Josh, Elein..) who sent us TShirts in early
2005 for Solution Linux Paris Feb 2005, where Jan came).

What to say?
============

- as always, we were asked for MySQL and PostgreSQL comparison, its a classic
now for us to talk about that. We were saying more than "It's All About What
You Need" (http://www.devx.com/dbzone/Article/20743/1954?pf=true) because we
hardly think PostgreSQL can handle now every usecase. We do break hard the
stereotype where "PostgreSQL is as difficult to handle than Oracle" or its
corollar "PostgreSQL is much more difficult to install and administer than
MySQL", etc.

- Lots of people are anoyed about Oracle/InnoDB/MySQL affair. Some professional
there told us that will be a definitive argument to migrate to MySQL. Most of
them migrated to Open Source databases to be free, and it seems they want to
stay free, what we understand.

- we were asked too about comparison between RDBMS, so I've begin to write an
article we will publish on www.PostgreSQLFr.org that is a review of all
existing articles on the web on that particular topic you can see a preview
of that document here : http://www.argudo.org/comparaisons_sgbdr.html
I'm still working on it. Its a ReST text source I convert to LaTeX/PDF or HTML
using rest2tex and rest2html (use ReST, it's awesome).

- we were asked about "what PostgreSQL do not do yet". Its easy to answer,
thanks to Bruce's work on the TODOLIST ;-)

What's new
==========

- Given our efforts on the website to advocate and explain PostgreSQL to the
common mortal, we are each time surprised of the technical skills visitor
have. He hope to be a part of that success... Some knows already here, we
have more and more hits each month. Just some stats on PostgreSQLFr.org:

Month Diff visitors Visits Pages Hits Bandwith
(2005)
Apr 6026 17769 35691 74830 1.07 Go
May 6633 23136 56360 100206 1.25 Go
June 6782 22883 61676 107817 1.31 Go
July 6252 26508 67486 108477 1.32 Go
Aug 5750 15636 37053 84341 895.73 Mo
Sep 7267 18759 47759 226336 1.35 Go
Oct 5561 13019 33491 161956 1021.20 Mo

We can see Sep has double hits than May->July period had, and that October
will confirm the 200K hits..

As a matter of comparison, we had about ~50K hits monthly during second half
of 2004.

- Some people are more and more interested in PostGIS. Its a good thing David
Techer open that website for french speaking countries (www.PostGIS.fr) We
did some advertising for him ;-)

- seems for professional the architecture based on pgpool+SLony-I with a www
front running pgpool and 2 servers running PostgreSQL is becoming a standard
for them, giving them a serious infrastructure for their needs.

What was BAAAAD
===============

- Too many people are disapointed we haven't got anything to sell at the expo..

There were Mozilla foundation guys giving away stickers, OpenOffice selling
tshirts, Debian guys the same... GnomeFr had a prototype of a new NOKIA
internet tablet running under linux with a Gnome environment on it...

We are kind of naked at each expo... If someone here can give us any
goodies to distribute here that would really be a plus for us.

As an example, all material (except TShirt for our staff) are bought or made
at home on our own (A3 posters, business cards with website's url, A5 flyiers, A4
printed articles, A5 PostgreSQL cheat sheet, etc.)

Once again, please, a little support from you would be really cool.

We can sell TShirts for you, and send back the money to PostgreSQL Global dev,
we'll take only 1 or 2 euros fee per tshirt, just to have our non profit
organization wealthy (we have today about 300 Euros of cash, we will buy a
plastic PostgreSQL banner with that, not much more. All that money came from
our members).

About 30 different visitors came on the booth with questions, about 200 took
some printed papers without questions. The whole exhibit had about 1000 to 1500
visitors on the whole 2 days (yes, its a local stuff, not national as SOlutions
Linux is).

Thanks a lot for reading this hudge mail.

Cheers,

--
Jean-Paul ARGUDO
www.PostgreSQLFr.org
Trésorier de PostgreSQLFr
OpenPGP : 1024D/93A41CA4