Citus Blog

As promised in the CFP for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024, all of the talk selection decisions were emailed out on April 17^th. Our talk selection work has now concluded, with the possible exception of accepting proposals from the Reserve list.

So what’s next? First I want to thank all of you Postgres people who submitted such amazing talk proposals into the CFP for POSETTE, now in its 3rd year. I was so impressed by the submissions and wish we could have accepted more of them.

And I also want to thank Alicja Kucharczyk, Daniel Gustafsson, and Melanie Plageman from POSETTE’s Talk Selection Team for contributing their time and expertise to collaborate with me to select the talks for this year’s virtual POSETTE event. It’s not easy to carefully read through and review 184 talk proposals—in just 8 days—to come up with the program for an event like #PosetteConf.

That’s right, 184 talk proposals—from 120 unique speakers. (The CFP had a maximum of 4 submissions per speaker.) With just 38 talks to accept this year, that means POSETTE 2024 has a ~20% talk acceptance rate. Bottom line, we had some difficult decisions to make.

The tl;dr of this post is that the CFP is open until April 7th 2024 for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, the free & virtual developer event brought to you with 🧡 by our Postgres team at Microsoft. Formerly called Citus Con.

If you have a Postgres experience, learning, epiphany, story, failure, best practice, “how-to”, collection of tips, lesson about what’s new, or success story to share—not just about the core of Postgres, but about anything in the rich Postgres ecosystem, including extensions—please consider submitting a talk proposal into the CFP for POSETTE.

Whether you are new to public speaking or a regular on the Postgres conference circuit, we’d love to hear your stories about Postgres. Before the CFP deadline of Sunday April 7th at 11:59pm PDT, of course.

When I think about naming something—like a feature or product or even an event—this quote always comes to mind.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

–William Shakespeare

What’s in a name, after all? I’m no expert on Romeo and Juliet, but friends tell me Shakespeare’s point was that names don’t matter. The thing itself is the thing itself, regardless of the name.

My parents named my sister “Helen” at birth but never actually called her that. They always called her by a nickname, “Lyena”. So my sister’s sense of self became intertwined with her nickname: she “felt” like a Lyena. And the only people that ever called her Helen were officious school principals, gate-check agents looking at her passport—and our paternal grandfather. It made her so mad. Whenever my grandfather insisted on calling her Helen, you could almost see the steam coming out of my sister’s ears.

My husband told me about a thing I’ve unconsciously done for years: whenever we drive through Suisun City en route to the mountains, I say the name of the city out loud to myself. Not just once but several times, like I’m chewing on the word. Turns out I really like the way it feels when I say “Suh-soon-si-tee” out loud.

Names carry meaning. They trigger emotions. The phonetic sound of a word affects whether you can remember it. And some words just “roll off the tongue” in a way that makes it easy to say and easy to remember. Bottom line, names matter.

Which is why we decided to give “Citus Con: An Event for Postgres” a new name. People had told us that when they heard the event’s nickname of “Citus Con” they thought it was only about Citus—and did not realize that over 66% of last year’s Citus Con talks were about Postgres, and not about Citus.

Say hello to POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, now in its 3rd year. A free and virtual developer event brought to you with 🧡 by the Postgres team here at Microsoft.

How do you feel when your day doesn’t go as planned? In this episode of the Path To Citus Con, the podcast for developers who love Postgres, guest Derk van Veen joins co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to talk about his journey from Java developer to Postgres specialist.

What makes you feel alive at work? Is it the routine tasks, the predictable outcomes, the stable environment? Or is it the unexpected challenges, the unknown variables, the chaotic situations? If you are like Derk (and I), you thrive on the latter. Maybe you love to jump on tough problems and find beautiful solutions—or maybe you enjoy the thrill of finding the root cause of a slow system or some faulty code. You don't just follow a recipe. You ask questions, explore options, and experiment with different strategies. How do you partition a table? Why do you partition a table? What are the trade-offs of each approach?

Episode 11 of Path To Citus Con—the monthly podcast for developers who love Postgres—is now out. This episode featured guests Jelte Fennema-Nio and Marco Slot who joined us (along with co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia) to talk about performance benchmarking, specifically benchmarking databases and Postgres.

The official title of Episode 11 with Jelte and Marco is “My Journey into Performance Benchmarking”.

I love hearing how people find themselves doing what they do, so it was fascinating to hear how they got started. One of the most interesting insights was the impact something like benchmarking can have on your career—even if you don’t particularly enjoy it!

The PGConf.dev CFP closes on Monday, January 15 at 11:59pm PST, so if you want to speak at the inaugural PGConf.dev, submit a proposal!

PGConf.dev is the new PostgreSQL Development Conference, the successor to PGCon, a Postgres contribution-focused conference that took place every year in Ottawa. Pronounced "Pee-gee-conf-dot-dev", the inaugural year of PGConf.dev will take place in beautiful Vancouver, Canada, on May 28-31, 2024—with many of the same conference features that made PGCon so great:

• sessions covering Postgres hacking and contribution
• full-day Unconference geared toward collaboration and impromptu creativity
• opportunities to brainstorm with others interested in Postgres development in the “hallway track”

What type of talks is PGConf.dev looking for? The CFP page for PGConf.dev has more details, but, in short: session proposals on all topics related to contributing to Postgres and how to ensure Postgres continues to be the best open source relational database on the planet.

The latest episode of Path To Citus Con—the monthly podcast for developers who love Postgres—is now out. This episode featured guests Lukas Fittl (founder of pganalyze) and Rob Treat (an early Circonus developer) on the topic “My Journey into Postgres Monitoring” along with co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia.

Have you ever asked yourself: “Why is my query so slow?” Or had to figure out which query is slowing things down? Or why your database server is at 90% CPU? According to Lukas, you might find these and many more answers by reviewing your error logs.

If you’re running Postgres on a managed service, what kinds of things do you need to monitor & optimize for? Versus what will your cloud service provider do? There is a discussion on this as well as a segue onto monitoring vs. observability: what’s the difference?

The topic of this month’s PGSQL Phriday #014 community blogging event—where people from different companies and different countries all blog about the same topic on the same day—is PostgreSQL Events. Big thanks to Pavlo Golub for organizing this month's PGSQL Phriday.

Deciding what event to blog about was a bit of a challenge—there are so many Postgres events worth shining a light on! Top of mind at this moment are PGConf EU which will happen in Prague in December—and the Path To Citus Con monthly podcast that I co-host for developers who love Postgres.

So what Postgres event did I choose for this PGSQL Phriday post?

I thought y’all might appreciate this “Illustrated Guide” to my Postgres experience at the PASS Data Community Summit 2023 which happened in Seattle, WA on November 14-17. Let’s dive in.

Did you know you can solve most of the puzzles in Advent of Code with SQL? In this episode of the Path To Citus Con podcast for developers who love Postgres, guests Dimitri Fontaine and Vik Fearing join co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore whether you can (or should) solve every data problem in SQL.

Learning SQL requires practice, just like any other skill. Dimitri will tell you why being lazy might just be a good reason to learn SQL. And how it can make your life easier and more efficient.

If you’re a fan of relational databases, you might have wondered how to pronounce the acronym SQL. Or maybe you’ve been mispronouncing it all along. So pronunciation is discussed too: Is SQL pronounced “ess-que-ell” or “sequel”? Vik, who is a member of the SQL Standard committee, has the answer to this question.

Version 3 of the “Activity Book for Postgres” is hot off the press. And you can get your own copy if you come say hello at the Microsoft booth at the PGConf NYC and PGConf EU conferences in 2023. The Activity Book will also be available at other Postgres meetups and smaller PGDay events that our team attends throughout the year (and it was one of the giveaways at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres earlier this year, too.)

Whether you have kids, or nieces, or nephews—or perhaps you yourself find coloring a useful way to distract your hands while your mind tackles complex problems—you can likely put the book to good use. And who doesn’t like a good bad database joke?

In this post, you’ll find out about the inspiration for the book, as well as the hidden meaning behind each of the pages—and a way to request your own copy.