Re: Linuxday 2007 visit in Berlin

Also sprach Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum (adsmail(at)wars-nicht(dot)de)


> I'm back from my one-day trip to the Linuxday 2007, this year in
> Berlin. The German PG User Group was not present with a booth. My trip
> was (among other things) to decide, if we will have a booth next year.

Just FTA: every visitor got a bag with some advocacy stuff. In this
bag was also the current issue of the "UpTimes", the members magazine
of the German Unix User Group (www.guug.de) This UpTimes featured an
article by me, titled: "Backing up PpostgreSQL data" and introduced
some ways of backup, like pg_dump, PITR/WAL, pgpool and copying the
cluster. So each visitor got some advocacy of PostgreSQL for free ;-)

I also made some advocacy for PostgreSQL in my Bacula presentation ;-)

The article (in German) can be found at:
http://net-tex.dnsalias.org/~stefan/nt/netbsd/advocacy/guug-uptimes-postgresql.pdf

> Judging last and this years visitors, the LD seems to be back in
> business, so i recommend to be present in 2008.

Since I have never been before to a LinuxTag, I cannot judge the
amount of visitors. But it seemed to be OK and the effort of getting
to Berlin from Magdeburg was worth it. There was more audience at
Chemnitz, but it differed a lot. In Berlin, we had more "professional"
questions, rather than the obvious "what's the difference between
NetBSD and Linux".

However, I would suggest to create some PostgreSQL-Day at the
LinuxTag. The next LT will be in Berlin too and since last year, a
BSD-Day is held there. On friday, one track of BSD-related talks is given.

I think it should be possible to get 6 - 8 PostgreSQL related talks
so that we can make use of the advocacy effect of the LinuxTag.

So any volunteers, wo can offer a talk? I can do one, so we need 5 - 7
more talks ;-) Once we are sure that we can fill the track, I would
inquire the program committee about a PostgreSQL Day.

> The different BSD groups want to organize some more presence and have
> asked, if we want to join them in something like "BSD use cases".
> Sounds interesting to me, also because the BSD groups did a great job
> with flyer sponsoring (they have some really good PostgreSQL flyers
> available) in the past and helped out from time to time, if we had to
> leave the booth for a short time. The BSD people have the same problem
> as the PostgreSQL people: it seems, that many companies are using
> PostgreSQL. But since the BSD license does not require to publish the
> source or even tell the customer, what OS/database is used, almost
> nobody knows about BSD/PostgreSQL. Why do we know? From time to time,
> this companies have a problem they cannot solve and then they are
> asking in a forum, on a mailinglist or even on IRC. But we should not
> wait until problems appear, if we want to know about the PostgreSQL
> usage in companies.

Getting more case studies is a clear task for the future. Hubert
Feyrer gave a status report of NetBSD and mentioned some companies
that use NetBSD as a base for there commercial products. Often they do
not talk about this and only print some sentences of the ad clause in
their manual. IMO we should ask companies that (might) use PG if they
are willing to offer some more infomration on that. It helps to
improve PostgreSQL, and since they already use PG, they will also
benefit from that. But unfortunately, some companies follow a
non-diclosure policy on that toppic.

BTW: some pictures taken by me can be found at
http://net-tex.dnsalias.org/~stefan/gallery/LinuxTag2007/

--
PGP FPR: CF74 D5F2 4871 3E5C FFFE 0130 11F4 C41E B3FB AE33
http://www.net-tex.de
http://www.cryptomancer.de
--
Worum haben die Menschen von Kindesbeinen an gebetet, wovon haben sie geträumt,
womit haben sie sich gequält? Daß irgendeiner ihnen ein für allemal sage, was das
Glück ist, und sie mit einer Kette an dieses Glück schmiede. Und ist dies nicht
gerade das, was wir tun? Der uralte Traum vom Paradies ...
Jewgenij Iwanowitsch Samjatin, »Wir«