The PostgreSQL community is growing every year and the same happens for pgconf.eu, which happened in Athens, Greece, this year. Attending this event is one of the best opportunities to get in touch with the people behind PostgreSQL. This year we had 778 attendees. May it be PostgreSQL hackers, users, developers, organizers or anyone else interested in PostgreSQL in some way or the other. While I am not going to give you any information about the sessions I’ve attended (you can check that for yourself on the conference website), I’d like to tell you why attending PostgreSQL conferences is such a great experience

First of all, this conference is about people. Here I meet people which I’ve not seen since last year, or even longer. But as soon as we meet again we’re one big family sharing the interest in free and open source software, especially PostgreSQL. What makes the PostgreSQL conferences such a great place to be is, that there is no marketing. Of course there are sponsors, and you may get in touch with them to check what services they offer. But nobody will directly come to you to sell you something. Of course there are competitors, but you don’t feel that because we’re once big group of people having the same goal: Making PostgreSQL the best open source database in the world, making PostgreSQL even more successful, and we all can be part of that.

Especially pgconf.eu is also a pool of local PostgreSQL user groups coming together. Usually, and this year was no exception, we have a SwissPUG dinner at the Thursday of the conference. Other local user groups do the same, and when those events are over most of the people continue discussing at either the conference hotel’s bar or somewhere else in the city. Given the size of the conference there are people from all over the word, a lot of different cultures, opinions, and ways of living. This mix is the second reason, why this is the place to be in October.

Finally it is about the content. There are sessions which deep dive into PostgreSQL internals, there are sessions around the PostgreSQL community which are not technical at all, there are sessions for beginners and for long term PostgreSQL users. There is something for everybody. But this is not all, as there are also plenty of technical discussions around the talks. You want to know something bout the JDBC driver, go and talk to the people who are doing the driver. You want to know something about PostgreSQL partitioning, go and talk to the people who either did it or are very experienced with it. There are answers for every question around PostgreSQL, you just need to either know who to talk to, or ask someone who can connect you with the right people.

Last but not least, the community is always looking for improvements:

See you all next year in? … and, by the way: