That’s a wrap! Another Postgres Vision is now in the books and it was a resounding success. The EDB team took to Cambridge to host our 3rd annual enterprise Postgres event at the Royal Sonesta hotel. If you missed it, you missed a lot! Check out our day one recap, and read on for a summary of day two.
The second day of Postgres Vision 2018 was kicked off by Gautam Khanna, Vice President and Global Head of Open Source Center of Excellence at Infosys. Khanna sees enterprises moving applications away from legacy monolithic architectures with 70% of organizations seeking open source alternatives as a key component of that process. Infosys and EDB have developed automated tools and accelerators to help enterprises with this transformation, and the Infosys Team wrapped up their session with an demo of the Infosys Code Impact Analyzer. When combined with the EDB Migration Toolkit, these tools significantly reduce the time and risk of moving legacy databases to EDB Postgres.
Attendees were then given an opportunity to hear directly from their peers, three major financial institutions profiling real-life case studies. Each discussed their own unique paths and reasons for moving off Oracle to EDB Postgres. Frans Verduyn Lunel of Binckbank discussed how a POC of an in-house developed system resulted in avoiding a need to refactor an application, while yielding “unbelievable” performance. Benny Rutten of Isabel discussed how Oracle’s cost and inflexible licensing had become a problem for Isabel. This lead Rutten to set up a private cloud environment on EDB Postgres, and he was able to set it up so that any Oracle DBA could manage it with zero transition time. Finally, the audience heard from Niels Zegveld of Rabobank. The company migrated 12 mission critical applications used to verify transactions against United Nations sanctions to EDB Postgres. Rabobank wanted to remove from DBA control things like OS access in setting up a new system and migrated from Oracle to EDB Postgres.
For me, the highlight of the morning was a presentation from Jeff Sutherland, Ph.D., the co-creator of Scrum, and creator of Scrum@Scale, though I may be biased as Jeff is a good friend and former boss of mine. In his keynote address, Jeff discussed how to efficiently coordinate Scrum teams in large organizations spanning multiple continents, languages and time zones. He also explained how finding an organization’s “minimum viable bureaucracy” can propel productivity and projects forward. While having a former colleague present made the session extra special for me, it was clear that the other attendees got a lot out of it. There were LOTS of questions from the audience and it was evident that many enterprises were actively working on perfecting Scrum principles inside their organizations. After his talk, Jeff stuck around to sign copies of his book, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.
The afternoon technical sessions included a hands-on workshop lead by Quest and my colleague, EDB’s Senior Vice President of Product Development, Marc Linster. They offered attendees practical skills to solve for performance, database size issues, memory consumption, locking, and more while using Toad Edge and EDB Postgres Advanced Server. Plus, there where a number of standing room only talks hosted by popular Postgres Community members like Bruce Momjian and Andres Freund.
Bruce Momjian, co-Founder and Core Team Member of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, gave a talk called “Will Postgres Live Forever” (of course it will!). Andres Freund, Senior Database Architect at EDB, discussed JIT and general Postgres performance enhancements. Finally, Craig Guarente, CEO and Founder of Palisade Compliance, led a session on using open source technologies like Postgres to break free from the shackles of legacy Oracle contracts to reduce IT spend.
The EDB team ended Postgres Vision with a surprise celebration (and a bit of a roast) of our President and CEO Ed Boyajian’s 10th anniversary leading EnterpriseDB.
We hope you’ll join us again next year. Stay tuned for news about Postgres Vision 2019. In the meantime, reach out at info@edbpostgres.com with any questions, comments, or feedback.
Signing off from Postgres Vision 2018.
Ken Rugg is Chief Product and Strategy Officer at EnterpriseDB.
