I'm currently at the airport waiting for my flight home from SolutionsLinux (I really like how you an finally expect an airport to have proper wireless coverage in all seating areas in an airport, and not just a tiny wireless hotspot with 5 seats and 200 people. About time. It's not free yet, but hopefully that will also happen)
In summary, it was a really great show. Lots of interesting people to chat with, both from "the team" (meaning the postgresqlfr guys, Devrim, Greg and Heikki - group picture in Guillaumes blog), people in the other booths and the people who came to visit our booth. There were a lot of interesting situations people brought up that they needed help with. Everything from configuring tsearch2 for special-case usage in french (I learned a little more about the French language, but mostly that I really don't know enough about the language to help with that. And I could learn a few more things about tsearch2 as well there) to tuning postgresql and stored procs for loading large amounts of data (no, it's not acceptable that it takes 2-3 months to load six million rows of master data and related subdata, even if you do a whole lot of checks on it). Hopefully we could be of help to some of these people, and managed to refer the rest of them to the proper place to ask more.
I would also like to add that I think the business/non-profit mix in the PostgreSQL booth worked really well. I've heard some people who have concerns about PostgreSQL company representatives (in this case, Dalibo, CommandPrompt and EnterpriseDB) manning a non-profit booth. But really, I see no problem. They are all in "community first" mode. Sure, they get to hand out their little flyers and business cards (of course they do!), but the primary work is to help the users as a part of the community. I can see how people can feel it could be a problem in theory, but if you work with the right people (which I have the feeling that we generaly do in the PostgreSQL community, given the representatives I've met from the pg companies - both now and earlier) it's just not going to be a problem in reality. (But Greg, pouring coffee over the competition may not be an acceptable thing. Try not to make a habit out of it)
So to sign off from that, a big thanks to the french people at postgresqlfr for inviting me and making me feel really welcome here, to Dalibo for taking care of the travel costs, to Devrim for a nice couple of days hanging out, and to all the people I met here for having a great time! I will definitely do this again next year if given the chance /mha/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=":-)" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /
Oh, and some free marketing for these guys for providing free wireless internet so we could communicate with the world, since our hotel didn't have one (hello, Gavin).
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