Shout out to Mark Long and Lacey Powers for showing up to support a Pg dude in a foreign land. Preceding my talk on PostgreSQL Performance, Adam Lowry gave and interesting intro to a database connection pooling module he wrote for Django. Essentially they bolted SQLAlchemy's pooler into Django. He then gave some metrics, showing that through the connection pooler they dropped overall request time in half. It was a basic and good indicator of why connection pooling is good, even on smaller applications. Of course I had to ask, "Why are you doing connection pooling in Django?" and pointed them to pgBouncer. It will be interesting to see if they metric against SQLAlchemy's pooler versus pgBouncer.

I haven't given a talk since I updated my laptop to Karmic Koala. I was a little concerned, every new release of Ubuntu brings about new surprises on the add a monitor, is the projector working, what is wrong with my laptop front. I will say that this was the easiest talk (in terms of facilities) I have ever given. I plugged in the projector, clicked the display icon, selected accept and it just.... worked. Yes, really.

Even better, I started OOImpress 3.1, clicked slide show and guess what? The projector displayed my presentation, not my laptop screen. Which means that I can now have notes in the presentation for the me (the speaker) and the presentation on a separate screen. Yes, Mac fan boys I know you have been doing this with Keynote for years but now there is yet another reason I don't have to move to Mac OS X.

This was the first time I have given the PostgreSQL Performance talk. It went a little faster than I expected so I will have to flesh it out a bit but that is good because there are items I didn't cover.

The PDXDjango guys seemed very happy with the talk, they even bought me a Martini at Vault. In case you haven't heard my rant yet, France apparently doesn't know how to make a Martini. I was there for 11 days, looking forward to a proper European Martini. France makes some fruity weird thing with an orange. Its not a Martini. I don't know what it is. I even asked on multiple occasions if they could make a real Martini, I even told the waiter how. They just said, "no". Sigh.