Could you briefly introduce yourself?

Hello, my name is Joseph Conway, but you can call me Joe.

I have been involved with the PostgreSQL community since 1998, and presently am a PostgreSQL Committer, Major Contributor, and Infrastructure/Sysadmin Team member. I am also the author/maintainer of a PostgreSQL procedural language handler for the R language called PL/R, VP PostgreSQL Engineering at Crunchy Data Solutions, and a Board Member at the United States PostgreSQL Association (PgUS).

Have you enjoyed previous pgconf.eu or FOSDEM conferences, either as attendee or as speaker?

Yes, I have attended and given talks at several past PGConf.EU conferences, and attended one previous FOSDEM.

What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?

The talk is basically a bunch of information intended to help someone new to PostgreSQL get it up and running and productive quickly. That is difficult to do in the span of a conference talk which is less than an hour long, so by necessity moves quickly and hits highlights. I will talk about installation, basic administration, psql usage hints, SQL syntax/quoting, and a whorlwind review of data types.

What is the audience for your talk?

The audience is anyone getting ready to deploy PostgreSQL, either for their own development purposes or as first steps toward a production server. I believe even folks who have used PostgreSQL before will learn some things they did not already know.

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

It would be useful to have some basic command line Linux skills and knowledge. The talk mostly applies to a Red Hat or Debian variant of Linux although some of the information does apply to other platforms.