There are grand plans for PostgreSQL, but just don't ask the development team about a road map.

"When I get asked why don't you have a road map I say we can't have a road map because we can't tell developers what to do and we don't know what we are going to be able to do?" Momjian said. "We have a lot of growth at the bottom in terms of new developers but not at the top in terms of people that understand what is going on. In terms of management we do a lot of things by the shoestring. A lot of the formal methods tend to obscure what is happening."

One contentious aspect of database technology is replication, where there has always been one camp of people who say there is not one suitable replication solution, but Momjian believes "that's just nineties thinking".

"The closest we have come now is about high availability and load balancing with Slony, pg-cluster, and data partitioning, and at least we got something down and we have a best of breed for each category," he said, adding there may be a solution in version 8.3 involving frequently updated rows.

"It seems as though replication adds so much complexity that if we can do it outside it would be better. Having it separate makes it possible to do version upgrades without any downtime. We won't put things out there that don't make sense."

Momjian, originally from Pennsylvania, said Sydney is a special place for him because it has the second largest number of PostgreSQL people per capital.

"Open source itself is obviously very strong here," he said.