Spring 2008 - a UKUUG Conference Review

As I arrived around 10.30am on Tuesday, I just caught the end of Testing with Selenium, very handy bit of kit.

- System Configuration : An end to hacky scripts? This was very good and showed an alternative (IMHO, much better) to things like Cfengine and Puppet
- An Introduction to DBIx::Class - Tom Hukins is an excellent speaker and a very nice guy to boot. Had some good chat in the pub afterwards, mainly Perl related. He knows his stuff.
- Building a new model for account management - I've meet Simon a few times before, he's another great guy. His talk was about a completely new way to manage accounts (and much more) that they are using at Edinburgh uni.
- Software patents and open standards - This was one hour of very interesting, worrying and intelligent discussion.

It was good to see so much Catalyst usage too.

The rest of the day was spent chatting with Matt and Mike, meeting lots of very clever people, drinking, eating and generally have brilliant discussions over dinner and in the pubs

Wednesday:

I sat in the PostgreSQL talks all day.

Simon did an excellent job being the event host. Dave gave us an insight into how the Postgres project works..pretty much like other well organised Open Source projects of this size. Chris fewtrell talk was interesting to see how Postgres is used at the core of a business.

Explaining the Explain was very technical, but also fun. I think some useful things for Postgres will come out of the HA talk.

Mark Cave-Ayland was another excellent speaker and his talk on Integrating Map Data with PostGIS was well worth attending.

A real eye-opener was Simons talk on PostgreSQL Performance Features in 8.3. Well worth an upgrade!

Simon has written his thoughts on the event up too.

Gavin.