PGBR 2011 is over

PGBR 2011 is over. It was a challenge to organize an event after 2 years and with a budget 50% higher than the last conference. Yes, we did it! It was an event organized by the community to the community. Thanks to our Kahunas (Fabio Telles and Flavio Gurgel) and our sponsors.

This year we had participants from another countries (Argentina, Peru, and USA). We are planning a better support from website and registration next year (sorry Joe). Also, some foreign speakers: Alvaro (Chile), Bruce Momjian (USA), Dave Page (UK), Greg Smith (USA), Jaime Casanova (Ecuador), and Koichi Suzuki (Japan).

I don't have the definitive numbers yet but we had roughly 250 participants from the 5 regions of Brazil. I talked to a lot of participants that bring to me interesting success stories from their companies. One of the many interested success cases I heard of was from Locaweb (hosting company) that migrated its DNS infrastructure from M$ database to PostgreSQL.

We had three rooms, 29 sessions (4 sessions from Timbira) and a lot of new speakers. In the first day I was at room 1 because I was coordinating the sessions along the day. I had the opportunity to listen Alvaro and Greg talking about locks and benchmarks, respectively. Also, I was in the round table about PostgreSQL service opportunities in Brazil. In the second day, I attended to Jaime's talk (repmgr) and Dickson's (extensions). At this year, I decided to submit a newbie tutorial that answers the frequently asked questions in the PostgreSQL mailing lists. Title is Everything you want to know about PostgreSQL but were afraid to ask. It was a challenge to keep the audience awake (1 hour and a half) after the lunch but I think I got it. Oh, I lost the Dojo (because it conflicted with my session). :( The last session I attended was that of Lucio. After that the awards. For the first time, brazilian community has decided to reward prominent members of the community. We had 5 categories (I was nominated in 4) and got one. Thanks for reconnaissance! The last session was the always-funny-session: lightning talks. 8 LTs with speak^H^H^H^H^Hstand-up comedians who entertained the participants (@lhcezar will stop working with databases and will start a career as singer).

Thumbs up to: local (hotel), coffee-break and beer (200 liters).

Hope to see you again next year!