Another year, another FOSDEM edition. As always, since this conference grew so big (fact: if you tried to watch all videos in a row, it'll take you about 9 weeks!), chances are, every review you read from the conference will contain something different, and therefore, complementary.

This is what I was able to experience. Let's take a look.

A recurrent theme in FOSDEM seems to be the high concurrency. There were lots of people attending, which made it difficult to make it into some dev-rooms, as they were overcrowded. In addition, some very popular dev-rooms got regular-size rooms where not enough people could fit (for example the PostgreSQL one, as opposed to last year). Because of this, I missed quite a few opportunities.

Introduction

Interacting with a database, can be a regular task of a developer, and for that we would like to ensure that we are developing and testing in situations close to a real implementation; therefore, using the same database as in production can help detecting issues early.

However, setting up an entire database server for development, can be cumbersome. Hopefully nowadays, modern operating systems like Linux have great tools and features that we could take advantage of.

In order to get the best performance from our database engine, most of the times, we have to take advantage of its exclusive features. This has the disadvantage of getting farther away from standard, ANSI code, and in the case of RDBM engines, this also means, most of the ORMs will not work.

Besides that, it could sometimes be worth exploring what we can gain by adapting to the engine.