LinuxTag 2005 ended on Saturday. Attendance was down to 12000 (from
16000) this year, probably because they started charging for tickets.
We had plenty of visitors at our booth, but we didn't really gain any
new insights or found out about new uses. We saw a lot of old faces
again, though. I have the feeling that this exhibition market is
saturated here. Maybe others who were there want to comment on that.
The two big topics were migration and replication. People were looking
for more specific information on migration feasibility and tools to
help them along. Especially with MySQL announcing a migration toolkit
or something like that. The database migration topic was also present
in the conference program.
As for replication, many people had heard of Slony, but many were still
clueless about the wide range of applications that the terms
"replication" or "clustering" might cover, say from hot-standby (DRBD?)
to load-balancing (Slony?). I'm going to work on some material or a
presentation to clear that up.
Books are also still in demand, both with users and to some extent with
publishers.
--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/