We're now at the stage where there's no one trying to find a seat, so we'll get started because we're two minutes late. Hello. Hello. Who's here for the first time? Okay, hands down. Who's been here before? Keep your hands up.

The people in the first group, look at the people in the second group. Those are the people to ask questions if you can't find us, okay? Thank you for volunteering. This is the 13th year. It's been an interesting year for me from an organizational point of view. We've had a number of speakers unable to get visas for whatever reason, and we don't really know why.

I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's just bad luck. For those watching along at home, I just pointed out our 13th year. Pardon me.

So the really important stuff first, the wireless is GU Ottawa. It's highly restricted with reference to what ports you can get out on. There is no password. You can just use it. Not all the ports are open, so you can't get to 5432 from here. Welcome to Ottawa. Who's never been to Ottawa before?

Is it the same people that have never been to PG Comm? No, it's actually fewer people. In my speaker notes, it says, how many of you have been to all seven PG Cons? You can tell how old this slide is.

So who's been to all 13 PG Cons? I have. So the reason this session exists and not a keynote is because we didn't get a keynote this year. But we always like to have an opening session because it's good to get everyone together in one room and just talk about what goes on at the conference.

In another conference I run, we actually have a newbies session the night before this point in the conference. And a lot of people go along to that. Instead, you've got me. So we'll just go through some thanks to sponsors and some points.

And then we get some questions and then we'll move right on to the talks because we'll have about 15 minutes between the start of this session and the start of the first talk. So you get time to get around. It is easy to make an argument that the most important people at a conference are the sponsors because there's stuff that I could not do without the money and the support from the sponsors.

It's very important that you turn up, but the stuff that we get here, like the food and the drink and the venues, it's not all covered by your registration fees.

So please thank, on this slide, Salesforce and Fujitsu. I have an old slide.

So we're going to start again. Fujitsu, Microsoft, Pivotal and Salesforce, thank you very much. Those of you that were here earlier will notice that the opening slide that you saw later in the session was not the same as the opening slide earlier in the session because they actually had the closing slides up.

More sponsors. AWS sponsoring the social event tonight, NTT, Crunchy Data, who is sponsoring the video, and Citus Data on the lanyards. Thank you very much. And so basically, PGCon would not exist the way it does now without the support from our sponsors.

So on this slide, we've got Enterprise DB, SRA, OSS, Timescale and Second Quadrant. Thank you. On site, PostgreSQL experts are providing the registration desk staff, volunteers, Stacey and Catherine, thank you very much.

Data Ygritte and Hygo. And last but not least on the sponsors, we have Avito, Adjust, Zalando and Creditif.

Thank you. Volunteers are a big deal at PGCon. Some of you may have emailed from Adam Thompson or Jennifer Russell if you're doing anything with accommodation or travel.

They helped me out a lot in that regard. Excuse me, I've already mentioned Stacey and Catherine. And whoever turned up to registration bag assembly yesterday, thank you for that. Oh, who carried boxes already? These people are important.

They're the ones that get all the gear to the conference site from my car and I thank you personally. This slide says 2015 but it also applies to 2019. If you go into the schedule and you give your feedback there, that goes anonymously with respect to you, to the speaker and the speaker can see what you really thought of the talk.

It also helps the program committee figure out who's really good speakers and who needs some help. Lunch at noon more or less. It's on the schedule. You know where to go. It'll be where you found the breakfast this morning. There'll be snacks and stuff right after the first afternoon talk so you have lunch, a talk and more food.

Tomorrow morning, the coffee will be out there again from about 9.30. And now to probably the biggest slide for today. When I sent out the email, it was mentioned that I didn't mention this point in the email about the social event. It's on the website correctly but tonight there's a social event.

You get in there if you have one of these fancy wristbands. If you don't have one of those fancy wristbands, talk to the registration desk. That'll get you in. Nothing else will. So don't lose it or give it away. We've been to this location before.

We're going again. BST Can this year was at a location just above this location and it turned out to be very nice. And next year we might go there for PG Con. They have this retractable roof and it looks out over the market and there's lots of standing space and a big bar. But tonight is more of a sit down.

That didn't sound very good, did it? This place is good too. We've been going to this place for many years. Sorry, sorry. If you've never been to PG Con before or more importantly you've never been to a closing session,

don't lose anything while you're at the conference. Or if you do lose it, make sure it doesn't get turned into the registration desk because it will come up for auction. And your friends or people you thought were your friends will bid against you. Fortunately, all the funds go to the Ottawa Mission.

It's an establishment just down here and they help with food, a shelter, medical, rehabilitation. They've been here for years. All our proceeds go to them. So, last point there. If you find something, turn it into registration and it will be up here for sale.

If you haven't checked out, we have some very nice slonics from Russia that will come up for sale. There's four of them. Spring, summer, winter and fall. The winter one has a special accessory direct from Russia that will accompany this elephant.

And the main thing is, I'm not going to tell you what it is until the closing session, but I figure that will go for much more than the first four. Any questions? I spoke with some of you yesterday. I said if I didn't cover your topic in this session, that you'd raise a question at this point. I covered it all?

Oh, yeah. There's an unconference poll running at the moment. Someone raised the point that sometimes during the two days of talks, there are things raised or people get interested in a topic and want to discuss it at the unconference. So there is a suggestion that we move Wednesday to Friday.

So the unconference would be on Friday and the talks would start yesterday. So you would have Tuesday would be tutorials. Wednesday would be the first day of talks. The social would be on Wednesday. Thursday would be the last day of talks, closing session, auction

and then Friday would be all unconference and maybe two tutorials. I do. Not this year. Next year. 2020. So it's on Twitter and on Facebook.

But we can do a show of hands here, but that doesn't get. So who wants it to change? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Who wants it the way it is?

Sorry, what? Not yet, no. Sorry, did you have a question? Yeah, the tutorials would be at either end of the conference.

Because if we go into Monday, that's because usually it's a holiday in the States. Yes. Yeah, that could be done, but it sounds unpopular.

So we can do that again. Any other questions before we do that hands up thing again? Because it's not set that it's going to change. It's just a question that came up, so we're exploring it. Who wants it to change?

Who doesn't want it to change or doesn't care? Yeah. Okay, who wants it to stay the same? That's about even. Who doesn't care?

Yeah, okay. Yeah, there's a difference between wanting it to change, wanting it to stay the same and don't care. There's three different issues there. Any more conferences? Oh, wait. It was waiting there.

So that's what we were just talking about. See, that addressed your question about time travel. Sorry. I had the slide ready, but it should have to went to when the question was asked. So we already talked about this, but we already covered the option as well. If you don't want the t-shirt and who wouldn't want to keep it,

the t-shirts, tote bags, and lanyards and badges will all be given away. The lanyards especially wind up going into the states and going to a camp for blind kids. A friend of mine runs that down there, and it's a charity. Hand all that stuff in at the registration in the lobby, please, if you don't want it,

or bring it here to the closing session, and we'll put it in the bin that goes back with me. Any questions still? Because we're almost on time here. There we go.

So if there's no questions, we go on to the talks. Thank you. Appreciate your time.