Friday saw Japan's annual PostgreSQL conference held at the Izumi Garden Conference Centre in Roppongi Itchome.  Billed as "Learn everything there is to know about PostgreSQL in one day" - the conference is the main event in the local PostgreSQL community. 

With major organisational backing and sponsorship from SRA OSS Inc., Sun Microsystems, EnterpriseDB, NEC Software and others, the event had a distinctly corporate flavour to it.  Along with the plush Roppongi location, I suppose this matches the image of PostgreSQL as the Oracle of Open Source Databases.

I have recently started as CTO of a company that uses an OSS stack, and PostgreSQL as the DB platform.  With my DB background being MSSQL, Oracle and Sybase, I have some catch up to do, so this was a great opportunity to get some concentrated exposure. 

Morning saw the keynotes, the afternoon was sessions ....

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Back at Builder Techday ... the next speaker, Masashi Sawada from Nifty, was there to provide a little historical context.  He has been at Nifty for 10 years, and talked about Nifty's place in the movement from PC Communication networks to the Open Internet.

Openness at Nifty

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Second Speaker was Kazuya Ishikawa from Verisign Japan, talking about the Open ID initiative. Verisign is one of the corporate members of the Japan chapter of the OpenID Foundation. 

He was explaining OpenID as User-centric ID Management, enabled by logically separating the ID provider from the provider of the service being logged into.

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