Today is the first day of the PostgreSQL Conference in Philadelphia, PA. I’m here specifically to attend training on Sunday, but since we had to pay the conference fee to take the training, it would be silly not to sit in on the sessions.

I’ve been learning a lot, probably because I have very limited experience with PostgreSQL before now. I’ve been playing with it for a couple of weeks in my spare time, and I’m really liking the feature set. If you’re solely a MySQL person, let me encourage to give you a shot. The installation isn’t difficult at all (in fact, most distros include it via the local package manager, which is great for playing around with).

Before now, I’d only really played with MySQL. I’m already envisioning things to do with PostgreSQL, and I keep thinking back to all of the times I was writing PHP code and wished the database could natively store arrays. Well, PostgreSQL can. Also, geometric shapes, and IP addresses, MAC addresses, etc etc. Really, you should just go check out the list of data types. It’s…*ahem* extensive.

Anyway, as I said, I’m having a good time. I met Jason Dixon, finally, after we’ve talked on twitter for ages. He was demoing Circonus, which is a SaaS monitoring / trending service. From what I saw, the interface looks nice. I’m guessing it’ll have a lot of business from people who don’t want to deal with monitoring on their own. In any event, their interface is slick.

So I’ve got a few more days here, and I’m going to try to make the most of them. If you’re here, let me know and we’ll meet up for dinner or drinks some night. If not, then I’m sure I’ll catch you at PICC in May. right? Right!