I’ve come to the end of my time in Europe now and I thought I’d share some of the feedback I’ve received from EDB customers along the way. I’ve been to Stockholm, Paris and Amsterdam, before heading on to Prague, Milan and Brussels.
During the Paris session we met with a mix of general Postgres users, those investigating the technology and EDB customers. There was a general desire to hear more about Postgres and how it is shaping the database market, especially in the enterprise. There were a lot of questions on EDB’s offering and how it could help customers modernise their application infrastructures, as well as shift to more agile Cloud-based database applications. Interestingly, the discussions were similar in Prague and Milan later on in the tour, which shows there’s a pretty consistent level of understanding and desire to learn more about Postgres in the enterprise. For example, in Milan we got into real detail about EDB Failover Manager, sharding and EDB pricing.
Probably the most packed part of the tour so far was in Amsterdam where I was scheduled to speak at the first PGDay Amsterdam event and the EDB Postgres EMEA Partner Day, as well as participating in planning sessions with my European colleagues at our local offices. PGDay Amsterdam was excellent, incredibly well run and everyone appeared to come away very energised about Postgres. I gave my presentation "Will Postgres Live Forever?" and had good interaction with the attendees. There was a really positive reaction when I talked about the relative merits of proprietary software and open source software lifecycles. I emphasised the continuous cycle of innovation in the open source community, whereas innovation very quickly tails off in the closed source sector, because vendors are more focused on driving efficiencies and profits than innovation once the product has reached maturity. It is clear enterprise customers across Europe are very receptive to the benefits of open source, especially the freedom from vendor lock-in, the speed and agility it offers them to develop applications and its interoperability. And, if you’d like to hear this talk for yourself, you can register for my upcoming webinars on this topic for the US and EMEA. 
The audience also understood the point that open source is not just about cost savings. When I went through the list of innovations and functionality in Postgres the audience was very impressed with how complete the features are compared to existing commercial databases – again underlining the point that Postgres is rapidly becoming the undisputed source of innovation in the database market! I gave the same presentation when I keynoted at the Partner Day along with our CEO Ed Boyajian. The event was also packed and there were a variety of presentations and workshops to help our partners understand the benefits of EDB’s proposition.