SitePoint mentions a couple of PostgreSQL sessions at OSCON 2006. Good to see more PostgreSQL stuff showing up there.
Theo Schlossnagle presented a case study on moving lots of data from Oracle to PostgreSQL. They needed more Oracle servers to accommodate their main app, but weren’t keen on spending the additional money. So they moved the data warehouse portion to PostgreSQL where Oracle was specifically require. This allowed them to use the datawarehouse Oracle licenses for their main app instead. The largest table was almost 1.8 billion rows, with selects that return 50 millions rows (100 Gig of data). They saved $500k in Oracle licensing costs and spent $100k to build their current solution. Nice way to save $400k. PDF version of the slides are available.
A. Elein Mustain showed how to implement “time travel” in PostgreSQL. Instead of deleting or updating data this involves a lot of time stamping to indicate what data is current and what data is old. This allows to query for information at a specific point in time. An example of this would be quering for the inventory of all your products on 1 Feb 2006 @ 3:04pm. PDF version of the slides are available.