Jim Mlodgenski Blog Posts

We just announced the dates and the CFP for PGConf 2018, our 7th Postgres Conference in the New York City area. We are back at the Westin in Jersey City April 16th-20th again this year just across the river from Manhattan and an easy PATH ride to all things New York. As we learn from year to year, we evolve based on our attendees and sponsors feedback. This biggest change we are doing this year is expanding the program to be a full 5 days. Our attendees have asked for even more training so we are now starting on Monday with several full-day training classes. We will then roll into half-day tutorials on Tuesday and the full conference schedule starting on Wednesday.

Other changes you will see this year is the 4th Annual Regulated Industry Summit will now be part of the main program. A number of people who wanted to attend the RIS also wanted to attend the tutorials so we removed that conflict while opening up the RIS to a wider audience. Along with RIS, we are hosting two additional summits. Thanks to one of our Diamond Sponsors, Pivotal, we will have the inaugural Greenplum Summit to bring together the best in Big Data, Massively Parallel Processing (MPP), Machine Learning, Graph, AI and Spatial Analytics centered around the Open Source, Postgres derived Greenplum database. Finally, we are having the Open Source Summit for our fellow local Open Source communities with data related technologies such as Python, R and Ruby.

All of this wouldn't be possible without our sponsors:

Platinum:        Compose, OpenSCG, 2ndQuadrant, Microsoft
Gold:              JetBrains, Cybertec, Citus, EnterpriseDB
Silver:            Command Prompt

Save the date and submit a talk at:
https://pgconf.org/conferences/2018

We just finished the first PGConf South Africa and it was a fantastic success. When we first started thinking about the event, we were considering 30 people attending as a good turnout and there were nearly 60 people in attendance. To put that in perspective, the first PGDay New York event in 2012 had 55 people attend. I can honestly say that South Africa and even the whole continent of Africa was craving a PostgreSQL event.

There were some great technical talks on topics like  PL/pgSQL stored procedures, PL/Python stored procedures, replication, and security, but what was truly fascinating was the use cases. PostgreSQL is the key data store behind the MeerKAT telescope handling a massive amount of sensor data, is key to helping South African farmers to know where to plant their crop and is utilized extensively through the medical industry in South Africa. The coolest thing learning how PostgreSQL was used for quality control from a 3D printer. In this one, it was not how PostgreSQL was used, it was that the 3D printer was actually a high powered laser that would melt through titanium powder.

Thank you to the sponsors, Quant Solutions and OfferZen to help to make the event possible. And a special thank you to Kobus Wolvaardt who organized the event.