Schedule | POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024

Tue, June 11 Add to calendar

KEYNOTE: All The Postgres Things at Microsoft, POSETTE edition

Charles Feddersen

Microsoft is investing a lot in Postgres—in Postgres open source and the Postgres core; in Postgres extensions like Citus, Patroni,… Show more

Microsoft is investing a lot in Postgres—in Postgres open source and the Postgres core; in Postgres extensions like Citus, Patroni, PgBouncer, pgcopydb, & more; and of course, in our managed PostgreSQL database services on Azure. But that’s not all. Our Postgres team at Microsoft is also investing time and money in the Postgres community—by sponsoring Postgres community conferences, by hosting a podcast, and by organizing POSETTE, now in its 3rd year.

In this talk, you’ll get an overview of some of the interesting Microsoft workstreams in Postgres in the last 12 months—with a look at some of the new Postgres features, the latest investments we’re making in Azure, and some of the exciting Postgres community work we’re doing, too.

Speaker

Charles Feddersen
Partner Director Product Management - Postgres at Microsoft

Charles is the Director of Product Management for… Read more
Tuning Parameters in Postgres vs. Tuning Your Queries

Henrietta Dombrovskaya

When it comes to database performance tuning, most PostgreSQL practitioners focus on optimizing configuration parameters. It is often… Show more

When it comes to database performance tuning, most PostgreSQL practitioners focus on optimizing configuration parameters. It is often assumed that as soon as we choose the correct values for parameters and restart the database instance, all the world's problems will be solved. Indeed, due to tuning the configuration parameters, we can observe that database performance increases by 10-20% and sometimes by up to 50%. That might sound like impressive numbers, but individual query optimization routinely makes queries run several times faster, sometimes ten or more times faster. All of us might recall some examples of such drastic performance improvement, but it is not easy to quantify the impact. In this talk, we will demonstrate the difference each approach can make. We will compare the impact of tuning different memory allocation parameters with the impact of creating missing indexes and, finally - with the impact of query rewrite. Hopefully, the numbers will speak for themselves.

Speaker

Henrietta Dombrovskaya
Database Architect at DRW Local organizer of Chicago PostgreSQL User Group

Henrietta Dombrovskaya is a database researcher and… Read more
Comparing Postgres connection pooler support for prepared statements

Jelte Fennema-Nio

Connection poolers have always been very important to achieve good performance in transactional workloads with Postgres. Sadly, for a long… Show more
Connection poolers have always been very important to achieve good performance in transactional workloads with Postgres. Sadly, for a long time this meant that you couldn't use prepared statements to reduce Postgres query planning overhead. But recently that has changed because prepared statements are now supported by PgBouncer, Odyssey, pgcat, and Supavisor.

In this talk you'll learn about the differences in prepared statement design, performance, and support between these connection poolers.

If you're interested in the answers to one of the following questions, then this is the talk for you:
- How a connection pooler can be useful when you are using Postgres?
- Which connection pooler to choose?
- Technical details about why Postgres prepared statements are so difficult for connection poolers
Speaker

Jelte Fennema-Nio
Principal Engineer at Microsoft

Currently I'm working on Citus, Postgres and… Read more
Everything you need to know about Postgres Row Level Security

Paul Copplestone

In this talk we'll cover everything you need to know about Row Level Security - what it is, when to use it, and how to write Policies… Show more

In this talk we'll cover everything you need to know about Row Level Security - what it is, when to use it, and how to write Policies that won't impact your performance.

Speaker

Paul Copplestone
CEO at Supabase

Paul is the CEO and co-founder of Supabase. Supabase… Read more
Open Source Contributions to Postgres: The Basics

Elizabeth Christensen

Postgres is the most advanced open-source database in the world and it's supported by a community, not a single company. So how does… Show more

Postgres is the most advanced open-source database in the world and it's supported by a community, not a single company. So how does this work? How does code actually get into Postgres? I recently had a patch submitted and committed and I want to share what I learned in that process. I’ll give you an overview of Postgres versions and how the underlying project codebase functions. I’ll also show you the process for submitting a patch and getting that tested and committed.

Speaker

Elizabeth Christensen
Crunchy Data

Elizabeth works with Postgres Crunchy Data and is on… Read more
Postgres-powered AI: Running an End-to-End AI Platform with Postgres on Azure

Jaehyun Sim

Ikigai Labs' AI platform, driven by Postgres, showcases its ability to handle diverse data types and benefit from a robust community… Show more

Ikigai Labs' AI platform, driven by Postgres, showcases its ability to handle diverse data types and benefit from a robust community ecosystem.

The platform's success comes from Postgres' ability to manage RDBMS advantages, such as ACID Compliance, alongside unstructured JSON data, ensuring compatibility with various data sources and programming languages. This versatility not only simplifies platform implementation but also enhances data interoperability of AI workloads.

The second pillar of Postgres' strength is its extensive community support, enabling Ikigai to integrate numerous open-source tools. By leveraging Postgres as a metadata store, the platform ensures compatibility with various data ingestion, processing, and analysis tools. This integration, coupled with Postgres' portability across cloud providers, enables Ikigai's AI platform to be easily deployable in any cloud environment, as demonstrated by its successful recent migration to Azure.

Ikigai recently launched the Azure version of its platform, previously exclusive to AWS, with under 3 months of migration timeframe. This achievement underscores the benefits of Postgres as the sole database choice, enabling Ikigai to expedite its migration process and capitalize on the platform's agility and scalability.

Speaker

Jaehyun Sim
Head of Engineering at Ikigai Labs

Jaehyun Sim is the head of Engineering at Ikigai Labs,… Read more
SaaS on Rails on PostgreSQL

Andrew Atkinson

In this talk attendees will learn how Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL can be used to create scalable SaaS applications, focusing on schema and… Show more

In this talk attendees will learn how Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL can be used to create scalable SaaS applications, focusing on schema and query design, and leveraging database capabilities. We’ll define SaaS concepts, B2B, B2C, and multi-tenancy. Although Rails doesn't natively support SaaS or multi-tenancy, solutions like Bullet Train and Jumpstart Rails can be used for common SaaS needs. Next we'll cover database designs from the Apartment and actsastenant gems which support multi-tenancy concepts, and connect their designs to Citus's row and schema sharding capabilities from version 12.0. We’ll also cover PostgreSQL's LIST partitioning and how to use it for efficient detachment of unneeded customer data. We'll cover the basics of leveraging Rails 6.1's Horizontal Sharding for database-per-tenant designs. Besides the benefits for each tool, limitations will be described so that attendees can make informed choices. Attendees will leave with a broad survey of building multi-tenant SaaS applications, having reviewed application level designs, database designs, to help them put these into action in their own applications.

Speaker

Andrew Atkinson
Staff Software Engineer, Author

Andrew is a Staff Software Engineer who specializes in… Read more
What Enterprises like about Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server

Kanchan Bharati

Are you thinking about building or migrating your app to run on a Postgres-managed service in the cloud? Are you wondering if Azure… Show more

Are you thinking about building or migrating your app to run on a Postgres-managed service in the cloud? Are you wondering if Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server is the right fit? This session builds on a popular talk from the 1st Citus Con titled, "Top 10 reasons to choose Flexible Server". Since a lot has changed (and gotten even better) since 2022, this is a much-needed update for 2024. This session will cover Azure Database for PostgreSQL advancements such as integration with Premium SSDv2 disk, the new azure_ai extension, adoption of pgvector, simplified Geo Disaster Recovery (GeoDR), support for Postgres major version upgrades, Enterprise Security including CMK and Entra ID Auth, seamless compute scaling, effective performance diagnosis/troubleshooting tools, as well as enhanced data protection through Azure Defender and more.

You'll leave this talk with a solid understanding of what enterprise customers like you need to know about PostgreSQL on Azure.

Speaker

Kanchan Bharati
Senior Product Manager

As a Senior Technical Product Manager at Microsoft, my… Read more
Scaling the Wall of Text: Logging Best Practices in PostgreSQL

Richard Yen

Something that many PostgreSQL users take for granted is the powerful logging features that it provides. With the right configuration,… Show more

Something that many PostgreSQL users take for granted is the powerful logging features that it provides. With the right configuration, DBAs and sysadmins can quickly diagnose performance, security, and configuration issues, saving precious seconds of application uptime. This talk will cover the major logging parameters in postgresql.conf, as well as provide some tips and wisdom gleaned over years of parsing through gigabytes of logs.

Speaker

Richard Yen
EDB

Richard has been using PostgreSQL since v. 7.4 in… Read more
Making Postgres inserts faster on Azure

Gayathri Paderla

In this talk you will learn how to increase the speed of your insert queries in Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server databases.… Show more
In this talk you will learn how to increase the speed of your insert queries in Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server databases.

You may have experienced frustration while waiting for your inserts to complete during migrations, daily import jobs, or within applications. There are various methods to achieve faster insert queries. Fortunately, you can alleviate this situation by implementing the following tricks:
1. Creation of unlogged tables (which does not create WAL files and inserts could be fast, however if any crashes we might lose data.)
2. Use a copy command for huge inserts.
3. Make your inserts in batches instead of single insert commits.
4. Tuning server parameters (like autovacuum, wal_buffers, max_wal_size, shared_buffers, Checkpoint_timeout).
5. Do we have any constraints on the tables? If so, we need to disable them during the inserts and enable them after.
6. Disable triggers if they exist before inserts if that is possible.
7. Remove unused indexes from the table.
8. One can also consider partitioning of tables if the table that is being inserted in is exceptionally large.
9. If the activity is one time you may consider disabling HA (high availability) drop read replica and create it back after inserts.
Speaker

Gayathri Paderla
Software Engineer @ Microsoft

I have experience of 15 years with Microsoft, Oracle,… Read more
State of the Postgres Extension Ecosystem

David Wheeler

The last year has seen a resurgence of activity around Postgres extensions and their distribution. A number of new registries have emerged… Show more

The last year has seen a resurgence of activity around Postgres extensions and their distribution. A number of new registries have emerged promising to make extensions easier to discover, learn, and install. The community has reacted to these developments with vigor, spinning up new projects and designs to refresh and improve the dormant services first developed a decade ago.

This talk will give a brief history and current of Postgres extension distribution, then outline the vision and projects aiming to build the extension ecosystem of the future. Whether you're interested in learning about, using, developing, or distributing extensions, this talk will have something for you.

Speaker

David Wheeler
Principal Architect and Chief Bread Maker, tembo.io

David Wheeler is a long-time PostgreSQL contributor,… Read more

Wed, June 12 Add to calendar

KEYNOTE: The Open Source Geospatial Community, PostGIS, & Postgres

Regina Obe

PostGIS, introduced in 2001, is one of the oldest Postgres extensions around. But PostGIS is not just built on Postgres. PostGIS is a love… Show more

PostGIS, introduced in 2001, is one of the oldest Postgres extensions around. But PostGIS is not just built on Postgres. PostGIS is a love child, born of the Postgres community and the vibrant open source geospatial community.

Today many geospatial applications house their data in Postgres, because of PostGIS.

And PostGIS is usually one of the first data sources to be supported by new geospatial tools, whether open source or proprietary. More importantly, folks who know little about spatial can get up to speed with PostGIS quickly and build geospatial applications—with nothing but an application layer that understands how to work with SQL.

In this talk you’ll learn how (and why) PostGIS came about, and how the open source geospatial community has huge bodies of data that will continue to place demands on PostGIS and Postgres into the future.

Speaker

Regina Obe
Paragon Corporation, PostGIS PSC

Regina Obe is President and co-founder of Paragon… Read more
Vector data in Postgres - how's it different from “normal” data?

Heikki Linnakangas

AI works with vectors. But what is a vector? How is a vector in Postgres different from integers, text, geospatial data, or other… Show more
AI works with vectors. But what is a vector? How is a vector in Postgres different from integers, text, geospatial data, or other traditional Postgres datatypes? Why can't you create a regular B-tree index over vectors? Ok, but why not a GiST index?

I will touch on these Postgres and pgvector topics:
- pgvector extension's data types, including the new sparse and bit vector types
- Curse of dimensionality with vector databases
- Vector search algorithms, including HNSW (hierarchical navigable small worlds)
Speaker

Heikki Linnakangas
PostgreSQL hacker & committer, co-founder of Neon

Heikki is a cofounder of Neon and a long-time… Read more
From Postgres full text search to Retrieval Augmented Generative search

Adam Wolk

This talk iterates through the design of an email search application, starting from basic search through Postgres full text search,… Show more

This talk iterates through the design of an email search application, starting from basic search through Postgres full text search, semantic search, and finally retrieval augmented generation (RAG), a new AI capability enabled by Azure Database for PostgreSQL. And this talk will introduce you to Milly the Mailiphant, who is ready to help with any Postgres database questions you may have.

Through the session we cover designing the search document, FTS feature inner workings, the pgvector extension to Postgres, plus how to leverage the azure_ai extension to Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

Speaker

Adam Wolk
Principal Program Manager in Postgres @ Microsoft

Spent 7 years working with Oracle PL/SQL in the… Read more
Lessons Learned from benchmarking and profiling distributed PostgreSQL

Lotte Felius

In this talk, I’ll explain how I investigated the performance of Citus using the Citus Benchmark Suite and YCSB. Quantifying… Show more
In this talk, I’ll explain how I investigated the performance of Citus using the Citus Benchmark Suite and YCSB. Quantifying performance however is not straightforward since Citus is a distributed system where queries are distributed across multiple worker nodes. Therefore, I’ll explain some of my learnings as a former intern with no prior experience in benchmarking Databases, which includes:
- The pros and cons of different architectures used for distributed database systems based on PostgreSQL
- Why quantifying performance is harder for distributed database systems and how you can use benchmarks to get an accurate indication of the performance
- How to identify bottlenecks based on benchmarking results and which optimizations you can possibly to do mitigate them
Speaker

Lotte Felius
PhD Student in the Database Architectures group at CWI

Currently, I am a second year PhD student at the… Read more
Data-intensive PostgreSQL: Three ways to scale

Marco Slot

PostgreSQL is the most versatile data-processing tool available, and a safe choice for practically any type of application. However, as the… Show more
PostgreSQL is the most versatile data-processing tool available, and a safe choice for practically any type of application. However, as the data volume and velocity in your application grow, a variety of bottlenecks can appear. The type of bottleneck depends heavily on the workload, so there is not one answer to scaling PostgreSQL.

This talk will discuss 3 data-intensive workload patterns:
- Growing SaaS app with a high transaction rate.
- Site-facing analytics dashboard with a high rate of real-time data.
- Interactive analytics on a high volume of recent and historical data.
For each workload pattern, we'll discuss the main scalability challenges and key techniques for addressing them in PostgreSQL.
Speaker

Marco Slot
Software Imagineer at Crunchy Data

Marco Slot is building a new generation of PostgreSQL… Read more
HA and DR at a glance with Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Silvano Coriani

Implementing a highly available (HA) database tier for mission critical applications with PostgreSQL is not a walk in the park! It requires… Show more

Implementing a highly available (HA) database tier for mission critical applications with PostgreSQL is not a walk in the park! It requires selecting the right technologies and workflows, plus involving people with the right skills. Those are the ingredients that a cloud vendor like Microsoft is baking into a PaaS service like Azure Database for PostgreSQL, so you can get business continuity out of the box.

In this session, you will learn about the capabilities offered by the Azure managed database service, from local and zone-redundant High Availability (HA) to Multi-region Disaster Recovery (DR) for PostgreSQL.

You will also learn how to leverage new features like Virtual Endpoints and Read Replica's "Promote to Primary" to create highly reliable deployments with minimal effort.

Speaker

Silvano Coriani
Product Management - Postgres on Azure

Silvano Coriani is a Program Manager in Azure Database… Read more
Even JSONB In Postgres Needs Schemas

Chris Ellis

PostgreSQL offers great support for JSON, which has been a game changer for me in a number of projects and use cases, offering easy… Show more

PostgreSQL offers great support for JSON, which has been a game changer for me in a number of projects and use cases, offering easy solutions for those times where you really need to store complex structures, or the unknowns.

However often you still need to be in control of what is being stored, or at least requiring some shape at minimum.

Thankfully PostgreSQL has a great range of features for ensuring data integrity and making our future lives easier.

We'll take a brief overview of PostgreSQL's JSON support, along with some practical and real world examples of when and how you can use it.

Then we'll look at how you can control those unknown unknowns with JSON Schema and CHECK constraints.

Speaker

Chris Ellis
Nexteam

Chris is a computing and electronics geek, who loves… Read more
Postgres Storytelling: What’s going on with Synchronous Replication?

Boriss Mejias

This is an illustrated Postgres story about Monica DeBea, a fictional talented support engineer based on real-life talented support… Show more

This is an illustrated Postgres story about Monica DeBea, a fictional talented support engineer based on real-life talented support engineers. Once upon a time Monica got a phone call at her desk at the end of the working day. She anticipated it was David again with a problem that would keep her at the office until the darkest hour. But it wasn’t David, it was Derk, the software engineer that is always walking around with a chess board, and he had a very interesting problem to discuss. Synchronous replication was extremely slow, and the only observable symptom was a huge amount of ‘SyncRep’ wait events. The network was not to be blamed, the CPU usage was smooth, and the RAM had enough space to still allocate the latest release of “Thundermother” in high resolution. So what was going on? This was a nice challenge.

In this Postgres “storytelling” talk about Monica DeBea, you will learn how synchronous replication works, how vacuum and large tables affect replication, and what you need to take into account with respect to WAL files.

Speaker

Boriss Mejias
PostgreSQL Solution Architect EDB

I'm a holistic system software engineer,… Read more
How to Work with Other People

Jimmy Angelakos Floor Drees

Lack of awareness around Mental Health issues has always been a problem in IT circles, leading often to unnecessary stress, burnout and… Show more

Lack of awareness around Mental Health issues has always been a problem in IT circles, leading often to unnecessary stress, burnout and strained relationships with colleagues and employers. This in turn can lead to employee churn for companies and strife within open source projects.

Neurodiverse colleagues might be struggling more than you are, first with WFH and now with RTO, with industry-wide layoffs, and with biased performance review schemes. Understanding how different things affect different people differently will help make a more safe and more productive workplace. Making things a little better for neurodiverse folks, means making things a little better for everyone.

We will share how our neurodiversity affects the way we work with others, as well as stories from peers. We aim to contribute to a better understanding of how your team members tick, and we want to invite people to share how others can help them get their best work done.

We believe that the PostgreSQL community could become one in which its members can bring their true selves to (their open source) work.

Speakers

Jimmy Angelakos
Systems & Database Architect, PostgreSQL contributor, author & speaker

Jimmy Angelakos is a Systems and Database Architect… Read more

Floor Drees
Staff Community Program Manager at Aiven

I'm a Staff Developer Advocate at… Read more
Accelerating PL/pgSQL Code Conversion When Migrating to Postgres

Deepak Mahto

Most of the adopters of PostgreSQL are folks moving from another database and code conversion or pl\pgsql development is a critical path.… Show more
Most of the adopters of PostgreSQL are folks moving from another database and code conversion or pl\pgsql development is a critical path. It is a session, we will walk through curated learning I had moving customers and large code bases to PostgreSQL with pl\pgsql.

Topics to cover
1. Subtle art of code conversion, conversion is art not matching code always.
2. Key difference in PostgreSQL that is unknown to all assessment tools but critical.
3. How to migrate not only for primary instance but for Read replicas as well
4. Key Differentiated feature of plpgsql and how to leverage it.
5. Leverage newer features added in PostgreSQL like alias, unique on null and more.
6. Avoid surprises around partitions like missing primary keys in partition columns and more.
7. Why not to Ignore nulls and empty string comparison and what impact it can bring.
8. How to Handle Packages in Oracle and how to accelerate its migrations.
9. Build Code planning and uncover dependency at start of projects.
10. Data type mapping and how to automate it using ora2pg. And more.
Key Takeaways for the participant
1. Understand pl\pgsql best practise from a migration perspective.
2. Uncover hidden caveats with code conversion.
3. Tips to accelerate code conversion.
Speaker

Deepak Mahto
Database Migration Specialist

I like to call myself a Database Guy who works in… Read more
PostgreSQL Partitioning: Slicing and Dicing for Performance and Easier Maintenance

Ryan Booz

As your database grows, the performance and maintenance of large tables can become challenging. Fear not! PostgreSQL has the right tool for… Show more

As your database grows, the performance and maintenance of large tables can become challenging. Fear not! PostgreSQL has the right tool for the job: declarative table partitioning. This talk will discuss the benefits of partitioning in PostgreSQL, including improved performance and simplified maintenance.

After introducing the benefits of table partitioning, we’ll take a whirlwind tour through the range, list, and hash partitioning types available in PostgreSQL, highlight common use cases and trade-offs. From there, we’ll dive right into practical examples of declarative partitioning and discuss some key considerations and best practices when designing the schema for partitioning.

By the end of this session, you will be able to create partitioned tables in PostgreSQL that improve the performance and maintenance of your application, allowing you to scale with more control than ever before.

Speaker

Ryan Booz
Developer Advocate at Redgate

Ryan is an Advocate at Redgate focusing on PostgreSQL.… Read more

Wed, June 12 Add to calendar

KEYNOTE: Why I love open source development & what I learned from K8s

Sarah Novotny

Every open source community I work with teaches me something. While I had a misspent youth in open source database communities, over the… Show more

Every open source community I work with teaches me something. While I had a misspent youth in open source database communities, over the last 10 years, Kubernetes has been my most fruitful teacher. In this talk, I’ll share a few of my favorite takeaways from the Kubernetes world about collaboration, community, and the chaos of humans developing code on the public stage of the internet.

Speaker

Sarah Novotny
Open Source Wonk

Sarah Novotny is a technology executive renowned for… Read more
Beyond Joins and Indexes

Bruce Momjian

My presentation Explaining the Postgres Query Optimizer covers the details of query optimization, optimizer statistics, joins, and indexes.… Show more

My presentation Explaining the Postgres Query Optimizer covers the details of query optimization, optimizer statistics, joins, and indexes. This talk covers 42 other operations the optimizer can choose to handle complex queries, large data sets, and to enhance performance. These include merge append, gather, memoize, and hash aggregate. It explains their purpose and shows queries that can generate these operations.

Speaker

Bruce Momjian
EDB

Bruce Momjian is co-founder and core team member of… Read more
Tales from the Field - Oracle to PostgreSQL migrations

Adithya Kumaranchath

Enterprises are increasingly making the move from Oracle databases to open source Postgres. This has emerged as one of the most common… Show more

Enterprises are increasingly making the move from Oracle databases to open source Postgres. This has emerged as one of the most common migration patterns in the recent times. I spent my initial few years of my career working with Oracle and later in PostgreSQL, and for the past 4 years my focus has been on Oracle to PostgreSQL. So, I think am in the best position to compare and talk about both of these database technologies in detail, share key learnings, and experiences from numerous successful (and failed) customers Oracle to PostgreSQL engagements. Some key questions that will be answered in this session: What are the drivers to migrate from Oracle to PostgreSQL? What are the benefits for business stakeholders and what motivates them to make this move? How difficult would it be for the team adopting to PostgreSQL? What tools are available for migration? How can mission critical applications be migrated with near zero downtime? How and why did a few customers fail?

Speaker

Adithya Kumaranchath
Architect @ Microsoft

I have been working with customers from various… Read more
pgvector for Python developers

Pamela Fox

Learn how to use pgvector, the Postgres extension for vector storage and querying, from Python scripts and web apps. I'll include demos… Show more

Learn how to use pgvector, the Postgres extension for vector storage and querying, from Python scripts and web apps. I'll include demos with the most common drivers and ORMs, like psycopg, asyncpg, SQLAlchemy, SQLModel, and deploy a full FastAPI app using pgvector for a vector search API. I'll also talk about embedding model options and indexing strategies.

Speaker

Pamela Fox
Cloud Advocate in Python, Microsoft

Pamela Fox is a human that loves to learn, teach, and… Read more
PostgreSQL physical replication - internals, latest development and opportunities

Krishnakumar R Melih Mutlu

In this talk you will get to learn about the internals of Physical replication in PostgreSQL. We will start with architectural overview of… Show more

In this talk you will get to learn about the internals of Physical replication in PostgreSQL. We will start with architectural overview of how physical replication works and go through details of various components involved such as WAL records, WAL receiver, WAL sender etc. Further we dig into details of how the recovery and WAL apply interacts to ensure that standby and read replicas maintains a consistent view. We will also delve into the role buffer pool plays in these interactions and look deeper into features such as hot standby feedback. We will also look at the protocol used in physical replication.

PostgreSQL 16 & 17 has some exciting improvements been made in the physical replication space. This session will go through the overview of those improvements.

Finally, we will conclude the talk with a brief overview of potential improvement opportunities in the physical replication space.

Speakers

Krishnakumar R
Group Engineering Manager, PostgreSQL engine @ Microsoft

Krishnakumar (KK) started his professional life with… Read more

Melih Mutlu
Software Engineer, Microsoft

Software Engineer at Microsoft. Working on open source… Read more
Using Azure Query Store to Understand PostgreSQL Performance

Grant Fritchey

Capturing query metrics in Postgres can be a challenge. This is especially true because when capturing metrics, it's not enough to… Show more

Capturing query metrics in Postgres can be a challenge. This is especially true because when capturing metrics, it's not enough to simply measure a query's performance. You must have multiple data points, a before and after if you will, to ensure that you know if a query is running faster, slower, or the same. Within Azure Database for PostgreSQL, there exists an extension, that measures query behaviors, and does it in a way to provides multiple data points, Query Store. This session will demonstrate why the Query Store will make it easier for you to identify the queries that need attention. Further, the Query Store gives you tools to help you with tuning those PostgreSQL queries on Azure. You no longer need to guess at which queries are the highest priority for your query tuning. Come to this session to find out how.

Speaker

Grant Fritchey
Redgate Software

Grant Fritchey is a Data Platform MVP and AWS… Read more
How/Why to Sweep Async Tasks Under a Postgres Table

Taylor Troesh

Instead of returning hostile "500" errors to users, a small async worker query pattern makes fault-tolerant design the… Show more

Instead of returning hostile "500" errors to users, a small async worker query pattern makes fault-tolerant design the default.

In this talk, we'll talk about (1) how backend/database design impacts frontend experience, (2) the pervasive insanity of hand-rolling two-phase commit, (3) Postgres as a platform, (4) how async DB queues form a natural complement to Jira, and (5) how the tiny async query pattern works, and (6) how to tweak the query for optimized parallelism, prioritization, and sampling.

Speaker

Taylor Troesh
mayor of taylor.town

Taylor tinkers with writing, learning, time, design,… Read more
6 things you can do with azure_ai & PostgreSQL on Azure

Denzil Ribeiro

Are you looking to spin up on how to leverage AI in Postgres in the cloud? This session will show you 6 things you can do today with the… Show more

Are you looking to spin up on how to leverage AI in Postgres in the cloud? This session will show you 6 things you can do today with the azure_ai and pgvector extensions combined with the Azure Database for PostgreSQL managed service. The session will cover how the azure_ai extension gives you the ability to call Azure OpenAI LLMS using SQL, plus how to use it in conjunction with pgvector from within your Postgres database. You’ll also see how the new AI features in Azure Database for PostgreSQL give you capabilities for text analytics, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, real-time translation, as well as how real-time scoring can invoke trained ML models. You will learn how easy it is to integrate your application with the Azure AI ecosystem.

Speaker

Denzil Ribeiro
Principal PM Manager @ Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Denzil is a Principal PM manager in the Azure Data… Read more
Revitalizing Outdated Data Models with PostgreSQL Views

Newvick Lee

Are you grappling with a data model that's fallen behind the times? Whether due to evolving business needs, legacy system constraints,… Show more

Are you grappling with a data model that's fallen behind the times? Whether due to evolving business needs, legacy system constraints, or simply the advance of technology, your current model doesn't have to be a stumbling block. In this talk, learn how PostgreSQL Views can update your data strategy without the need for costly migrations and code refactoring. Dive into the practical benefits, trade-offs, and helpful tips for using Views to address common problems such as data integrity and report generation, ensuring your database continues to serve you effectively.

Speaker

Newvick Lee
Software Developer and Data Wrangler

I'm a software developer with experience working… Read more
What Makes Azure Database for PostgreSQL Great for Developers?

Varun Dhawan

What matters to developers in a managed database service for PostgreSQL? Of course you care about integration with other tools, ease of… Show more

What matters to developers in a managed database service for PostgreSQL? Of course you care about integration with other tools, ease of configuration, data protection, and performance tuning. But what else? In this talk, discover 8 things in Azure Database for PostgreSQL you'll find useful. What are these 8 features? Let’s find out!

Learn how Flexible Server not only supports the latest open source Postgres release but also integrates with 60 essential extensions such as pgvector, PostGIS, and TimescaleDB—plus how Azure Bicep can simplify your deployment processes. We'll also detail how AAD (EntraID) makes connectivity straightforward and secure.

Additionally, we'll examine integrations with popular developer tools including Azure Open AI, Power BI, and Azure Data Studio. With Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server, you'll likely also appreciate customizable configuration flags, Query Store, and Performance Insights.

This session is ideal for anyone interested in running on a cloud-based PostgreSQL service, from beginners to seasoned users. Join us to learn how these 8 features in Azure Database for PostgreSQL features can make your life better in the cloud.

Speaker

Varun Dhawan
Product @ Microsoft Azure Data ☁️

Varun Dhawan is a Senior Product Manager @Microsoft… Read more

Wed, June 13 Add to calendar

KEYNOTE: A Walking Tour of PostgreSQL

Thomas Munro

I'll talk about the origins and history of PostgreSQL and the POSTGRES research project it descends from; how it fits into the space of… Show more

I'll talk about the origins and history of PostgreSQL and the POSTGRES research project it descends from; how it fits into the space of databases; and how it fits into the space of open source projects. I’ll show how hundreds of open source developers and companies collaborate to make PostgreSQL. I’ll talk about a couple of projects on my own journey from long-time user through to full-time developer and committer. And how anyone with an itch to scratch is welcome to get involved. Let’s go on a walking tour of PostgreSQL together!

Speaker

Thomas Munro
PostgreSQL hacker working at Microsoft

I am a PostgreSQL developer and committer based in New… Read more
Partitioning your Postgres tables for 20X better performance

Derk van Veen

Over the last two years we mastered the skill of creating and maintaining partitions in PostgreSQL and shared our work with the Postgres… Show more

Over the last two years we mastered the skill of creating and maintaining partitions in PostgreSQL and shared our work with the Postgres database community: https://github.com/Adyen/adyen-postgres-partitioning.

But we forgot a very important detail. Until now we have been partitioning individual Postgres tables in the most optimal way, taking locking into account. But in a relational database you JOIN a lot of tables together. And we did not optimise our strategy for joining, resulting in suboptimal database performance—and even an almost performance incident.

In this session I will share our latest insights with respect to Postgres partitioning, optimal partitioning strategies, and how to use check constraints to help the Postgres query optimiser create the best plans.

With the improved strategy and denormalising a few Postgres tables, we have been able to make queries up to 50 times faster. We have been totally blown away by the results this far.

Speaker

Derk van Veen
Database specialist @ Adyen

Derk van Veen is a database specialist at Adyen. Adyen… Read more
Where do the performance cliffs come from?

Tomas Vondra

When running queries on a Postgres database, chances are you have experience with hitting a "performance cliff" - an abrupt… Show more

When running queries on a Postgres database, chances are you have experience with hitting a "performance cliff" - an abrupt change of performance for a given Postgres query, after only a small change in data and/or query parameters.

In this talk, you'll learn why performance cliffs happen in Postgres. After a brief explanation of how cost-based optimizers work and what assumptions that relies on, I'll show a couple examples why/how it fails. I'll also share recommendations on how to mitigate these issues.

If time permits, I'll talk about a couple interesting improvements & possible solutions proposed in recent research projects, focused on making Postgres query execution more adaptive & robust.

Speaker

Tomas Vondra
EDB

long-term PostgreSQL contributor & committer,… Read more
Hazards of logical decoding in PostgreSQL

Polina Bungina

Logical decoding was introduced in PostgreSQL 9.4 and has been greatly improved since then. One of the popular use cases of this feature is… Show more

Logical decoding was introduced in PostgreSQL 9.4 and has been greatly improved since then. One of the popular use cases of this feature is implementation of the Change Data Capture (CDC) pattern. Although developers are usually eager to adopt this modern approach to make use of all the apparent benefits it brings, my strong belief is that usage of logical decoding in PostgreSQL requires at least a basic understanding of the implementation and should definitely be treated with great care. In this talk I will share the problems we, as Zalando's DBaaS team, dealt with while adopting and maintaining our internal CDC solution based on logical decoding and point you out to the nuances you should always keep in mind when using this technology.

Speaker

Polina Bungina
Senior Software Engineer, Zalando SE

Software and database engineer at Zalando. Greenplum… Read more
PostgreSQL performance tips you have never seen before V2.0

Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Most people are aware of the standard ways to improve performance. More RAM, more CPUs, better storage and alike. However, there are many… Show more

Most people are aware of the standard ways to improve performance. More RAM, more CPUs, better storage and alike. However, there are many hidden tricks which can be applied to make your database faster, more efficient and more user friendly.

Welcome to secret performance tips you have never seen before. This talks adds many tricks to what has been presented last years and hopefully enjoys even more attraction

Speaker

Hans-Jürgen Schönig
CEO of CYBERTEC

Hans-Jürgen Schönig has been in professional… Read more
Autotuning PostgreSQL on Azure Flexible Server

Luigi Nardi

We'll explore the intricate world of PostgreSQL parameter tuning, where the database management system reveals a multitude of… Show more

We'll explore the intricate world of PostgreSQL parameter tuning, where the database management system reveals a multitude of configurable parameters that govern its runtime behavior. As the system evolves, the increasing number, the non-linear relationship and the complexity of these parameters highlight the importance of their correct configuration in optimizing application performance and cloud resource utilization.

This talk delves into various tuning approaches. We'll start with the traditional, meticulous method of manual tuning, relying on expert analysis of metrics like query response times and resource usage. We'll then explore heuristic-based tools like PGTune and PostgreSQL Configurator, offering one-size-fits-all solutions. Finally, we'll set our sights on the future: auto-tuning with machine learning. We'll showcase how these more sophisticated methods can be customized to a specific workload and machine resources.

We'll highlight the challenges and the advantages of transforming PostgreSQL into a more self-driving database management system and show a proof-of-concept on auto-tuning PostgreSQL Azure Flexible Server with some preliminary performance results.

Speaker

Luigi Nardi
Founder & CEO at DBtune

Luigi Nardi is the founder and CEO of DBtune (Read more
You Don't Need a Database Backup Policy

Karen Jex

I can hear what you’re thinking: “Don’t be ridiculous, Karen! Of course I need a database backup policy. All hell will… Show more
I can hear what you’re thinking: “Don’t be ridiculous, Karen! Of course I need a database backup policy. All hell will break loose if I don’t backup my Postgres databases.”

Hear me out. A backup policy specifies things like
- type and frequency of backups
- backup tool(s)
- backup storage and retention
But how do you decide those things? Finger in the air? Copy what you put in place for your other Postgres databases?

Since the primary goal of backing up your Postgres databases is probably to recover data in case of failure, it makes more sense to consider
- the types of failure you need to be able to recover from
- how quickly you need to recover
- how much data you can afford to lose
The answers to these recovery-based questions will determine how and when you take backups. In this talk, we’ll look at the different things you need to consider in order to be confident in your ability to recover your Postgres database from disaster.
Speaker

Karen Jex
Senior Solutions Architect at Crunchy Data

Karen was a database administrator for over 20 years… Read more
Advancing Drug Search with PostgreSQL and Azure AI

Taras Kloba

"Advancing Search with PostgreSQL and Azure AI" is a session that details how PostgreSQL's features and Azure AI Services can… Show more

"Advancing Search with PostgreSQL and Azure AI" is a session that details how PostgreSQL's features and Azure AI Services can be effectively used to significantly enhance the search functionality in any application.

In this session, we'll share insights on how we used PostgreSQL to facilitate precise searches across multiple fields in our mobile application. The techniques include using LIKE and ILIKE operators and integrating a trigram-based search to handle potential misspellings, thereby increasing the search accuracy.

We'll also discuss how the azure_ai extension on PostgreSQL databases in Azure and Azure AI Services were utilized to create vectors from user input, a feature beneficial when users wish to find specific items based on text prompts.

While our application's case study involves a drug search, the techniques and principles shared in this session can be adapted to improve search functionality in a wide range of applications. Join us to learn how PostgreSQL and Azure AI can be harnessed to enhance your application's search capability.

Speaker

Taras Kloba
Senior Partner Solutions Architect, Data & AI at Microsoft

I'm Taras Kloba, Associate Director of Big Data… Read more
Vindicating ZFS with PostgreSQL: Unleashing the Power of Scalability

Federico Campoli

In the ever-evolving landscape of database systems, PostgreSQL stands as a robust and highly capable RDBMS. However, achieving optimal… Show more

In the ever-evolving landscape of database systems, PostgreSQL stands as a robust and highly capable RDBMS. However, achieving optimal performance at scale requires careful consideration of the underlying file system.

This presentation will talk about ZOL (ZFS on Linux), a powerful and advanced file system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. ZFS point of strength are robust data storage management, data integrity, data compression, snapshotting, and efficient storage allocation. However ZFS performances are terrible if compared with the native file systems like XFS or EXT4.

This presentation will help the attendees to have a better understanding for harnessing the power of ZFS and run PostgreSQL on ZOL at scale levels not so different from XFS or EXT4.

Speaker

Federico Campoli
Freelance PostgreSQL consultant

Federico is a freelance consultant with long… Read more
Semantic search with Django, PostgreSQL, & pgvector

Paolo Melchiorre

Artificial intelligence is now a required functionality in many fields, and we often find ourselves needing to add to existing… Show more

Artificial intelligence is now a required functionality in many fields, and we often find ourselves needing to add to existing projects.

The first problem to face is that of having to store the vectors, there are vector databases ready to use, but they also introduce new problems, fortunately pgvector allows us to continue to exploit PostgreSQL for this purpose.

In this talk we will see how to add semantic search functionality to an existing Python-based web project, in particular Django, with data storage on PostgreSQL.

Speaker

Paolo Melchiorre
CTO @ 20tab - Django Software Foundation member

I’m Paolo Melchiorre, a longtime Python backend… Read more