However, what has really surprised me is the number of individual emails I have received from people. Generally speaking, the Conferences East and West are self populating. The community knows the conferences exist. They know it generates funds for PgUS and .Org. They also know that it is a chance to meet a lot of the contributors, learn and generally just have a good time.

What is new, is the people that are contacting me are not normal members of the community. You are not going to see them on -general or -hackers. These are true End Users. They represent the community, outside the community. What I want to know is where these people are coming from? Are they new to PostgreSQL? Are they exploring new alternatives to legacy databases such as MySQL? Perhaps PostgreSQL is just growing up.

Don't get me wrong, PostgreSQL for many years has far surpassed any open source database in overall capability, performance, management and features. However, the community as a whole has only recently realized the importance of cross pollination to other user groups and not being so anal retentive that all we do is turn off potential users. I think we are starting to see actual pay off there.

As an example, I know SelenaD and JoshB are both speaking at non-traditional conferences about PostgreSQL. For my part, I have been actively speaking at user groups around the Pacific Northwest, including Django, Python and next week Perl. My topic of course is, PostgreSQL Performance.

So, with all the changes in our ecosystem, I invite anyone to contact me about the conference, PgUS or .Org. I would love to just chat, possibly visit your user group or help you find a speaker for your user group.

Don't forget to come to East. This conference is going to rock!