Wow! Was that a workshop or what? That's how all technology/research/science meetings should be. It must have been the best workshop/conference I've attended so far.
What's HPTS? It's a group of scientists and industry people getting together and talking about stuff. HPTS likes databases, transaction processing, scalable systems, etc. However, those of us talking about Web Services and Service Orientation, or those who talked about the Web were also welcomed. The fun part is that people wanted to be at this meeting not because they got a paper published; there are no proceedings, the position paper or the presentation won't count as a publication. We all just wanted to be there because it was fun. Really great minds talking to you about your work and giving you ideas. Having a look at what others are doing and how they think. How cool is it when a Turing Award winner like Jim Gray comes and asks you about MEST 🙂 Granted... I didn't explain it very well during my presentation so he had to ask, but still... 🙂
Also, I was amazed about the people from the industry who were there talking about their work. We were asked not to report what was discussed because some of the stuff was actually about how the big names on the Web solve their scalability problems, how they build their infrastructure, etc. It was great to hear someone from big company X giving advice to someone from big company Y about how a particular problem was solved. What a great sense of community! I hope I am not forgetting any of the big companies that were represented... (in no particular order) IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Sun, Oracle, eBay, Paypal, BEA, SAP.
Pat Helland was excellent as always. His Metropolis talk was fantastic (I only wish some XML-sceptics were there to feel the Pat Helland love). He also sang for us his "Mr. CIO guy". Excellent!
All the talks were interesting, the place great, the discussions fantastic! Here's a group photo. There will be more photos on the HPTS web site.
I will definitely try to go to all meetings from now on.