I’m spend­ing a few days immersed in PostgreSQL com­mu­nity out in New York City at the PostgreSQL Conference East. And look­ing for peo­ple inter­ested in work­ing at Emma, because we’re hir­ing!

My first day was a mix of in-depth con­cur­rency con­trol geek­ery, object rela­tion map­pery, SSL and community.

I started things off with Kevin Grittner’s talk about Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI). I posted my raw notes here, and I’m sure he’ll post his slides soon. His pre­sen­ta­tion was long on detail about the use cases that helped drive his work on SSI and included ref­er­ences to the orig­i­nal papers. He’ll be giv­ing a related talk at PgCon with the other author of the patch, Dan Ports.

Next I had lunch with Rob Wultsch, who just joined Facebook, Magnus Hagander, David Fetter, who’s joined VMWare, Devrim Gunduz, Vanessa Hurst, Jonathan Katz and a few oth­ers. We chat­ted about new Postgres fea­tures, how to give train­ing courses to begin­ners and the future of Facebook Privacy (sorry to put you on the spot again, Rob!)

The after­noon was a series of talks about Postgres’ SSL imple­men­ta­tion and fea­tures, Vanessa’s ORM prob­lems and solu­tions talk and then a cou­ple hours of review­ing some new Python code for a URL short­ener for planet.postgresql.org (we finally got ahold of the postgr.es domain!) and hav­ing a long con­ver­sa­tion about law, per­sonal lib­erty and data visualization.

The con­ver­sa­tions extended into an evening din­ner with core PostgreSQL devel­op­ers cour­tesy of EnterpriseDB. I talked about the pos­si­bil­ity of a new type of index in Postgres with Jeff Davis and Stephen Frost. We dis­cussed the dif­fi­culty most com­pa­nies and con­sul­tan­cies are hav­ing find­ing DBAs, and the bare begin­nings of a hilar­i­ous mar­ket­ing plan we’re going to try — tar­get­ing Oracle DBAs to get them to con­vert their skills over to Postgres.

As always, we brought the party to a final loca­tion, and I got to spend a lit­tle time with Jan Wieck, the orig­i­nal author of PL/Tcl and PL/PgSQL.

All in all, a great day! And look­ing for­ward to talks by Jeff Davis, Stephen Frost and Greg Smith today.