ITPUGLab @ PGDay.IT 2015

I had the opportunity and pleasure to play an active role in the third ITPUGLab, a well established tradition and a successful event me and my friend Gianluca proposed a few years ago.
And I have to say: it was really fun and educative.

What is the ITPUGLab? In short: it is an Open Space container entirely focused on PostgreSQL.
Attendees meet for exchanging, proposing or requesting ideas, thoughts, approaches and experiences getting 'hands-on' in a LAN environment and building a constructive shared experience on their laptops, or even philosophical discussions of any kind all being user-experience centric and related to PostgreSQl. No matter what the participants' skill level is.
There are no predefined contents: attendees come and propose or join others' proposals.

The evolution of the shared interactive contributions is what leads to discovering a path (not necessarily the right one) and get to a possible goal.

This translates to human-networking with a  PostgreSQL-social approach, allowing attendees to get acquainted in ways one cannot predict.

This year we had two and half hours dedicated to the lab, a very comfortable room and very nice people attending.

The following is the list of topics discussed end experienced:

• installation on Microsoft Windows, where the users challenged the differences on installing PostgreSQL on a Unix-unlike machine, coming to the goal of providing a running instance to other people in the room;
• migration and upgrade, with particular interest to the migration of a quite old cluster from a MS Windows machine to a mature and up-to-date cluster on a *nix machine, as well how to do it automatically and error-safely;
• install, configure and use the PostGIS extension from scratch;
• pl/pgsql scripting, with particular focus on editors, repos and best practices;
• data integrity check and validation with regard to the database and/or application;
• periodical data dump and load from one server to one (or many) others, with regard to various scenarios and possible automations.

Rules in the ITPUGLab are simple: after introducing themselves, participants start grouping spontaneously, warm up and get discussing, hands-on. Everybody can join a formed OpenSpace as well as leave it or, even, the room. When it's over, it's over: once the time elapsed pencil are down, and what happened is always the only and rightmost thing could happened.
Pictures cannot provide the excitement and fun filling the room.

As said, this is the third edition of the ITPUGLab, and quite frankly I'm proud of the continuous success it is getting within the PGDay.IT annual conference.
One thing all the three edition did have in common is the same request by attendees for more time: we are evaluating how to extend the session in the next PGDay.IT.

If you are coming to the next PGDay.IT, get into the lab: it's an experience you really don't want to miss!