Yesterday, I was at the first ever PostgreSQL UK conference, in Birmingham. The venue was familiar from various events last year, such as GUADEC and PyCon UK - the Conservatoire is becoming quite established as a relatively cheap, central UK venue for technical events.

I gave a talk about monitoring PostgreSQL databases on behalf of credativ. (Slides for all the talks are available on the PostgreSQL wiki.) I got a reasonable level of comments and feedback afterwards, and perhaps those will help with the development of some better monitoring solutions. The act of preparing the talk also let me discover a few different monitoring tools that look useful - perhaps I'll get the chance to look at them at some point.

As for the conference itself, there were some interesting talks about PostGIS, full text searching, and analysis of EXPLAIN output. I think it was worth attending just for those; but we also got to meet a bit more of the PostgreSQL developer community in the UK. We also got in on the beginnings of the new UK user group - hopefully they will be organising more meetings over the coming months.