Ultimate Guide to Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2022

One of the good things with a virtual event like Citus Con is that you have a lot of flexibility about where and when to watch the talks. From your home office, or a café, or the beach—or even the car, while you wait to pick up your kids. As long as you have an internet connection, you’re in.

But you still need to figure out which talks and livestreams you want to watch when the event goes live on Tuesday, April 12. To help you out, we’ve created this guide to Citus Con: An Event for Postgres. And just for kicks I’m calling it the “Ultimate Guide” to CitusCon. (Ha! Since this is a first time event maybe it will be the only guide to Citus Con. Therefore definitely “ultimate”.)

In working on this event—I’m a co-chair along with Teresa Giacomini, also head of the talk selection team—I realized I had “tagged and categorized” each and every talk both in my head and on a spreadsheet. So that’s what this blog post will give you… a framework for knowing which talks are in which categories.

Of course, if you want to see the abstracts for all the talks, just pop over to the Schedule & Sessions page for Citus Con.

There’s a tab for all 18 of the “Live sessions”
Plus a tab for all 20 of the “On-demand sessions”
When you click on each of the talk titles the accordion opens up and you can see the detailed abstract plus the speaker’s bio, too.
Updated April 26, 2022: Videos for all 38 sessions are also available on the Schedule page

And please be sure to mark your calendar, either for the entire Citus Con event—or for the Americas, APAC, or EMEA livestream.

3 Keynotes, one for each of the Americas, APAC, and EMEA livestreams

Each of the 3 livestreams has one keynote talk, and we are oh so excited about each of these speakers and what they have to share with us. Let’s dive in:

The Building Blocks for Self-Driving PostgreSQL, by Andy Pavlo, the Professor of Databaseology in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. To kickoff the entire event, Andy will be keynoting the Americas livestream at 9:00am PDT on Tue April 12th. (Americas livestream, keynote, ML, self-driving, Postgres future)
8 keys to the growth of Citus & Distributed PostgreSQL, by Umur Cubukcu who is head of the PostgreSQL and Citus PM team at Microsoft and former co-founder and CEO of Citus Data. Bonus points, Umur was also my boss for many years at Citus too! Umur will be keynoting the APAC livestream. (APAC livestream, keynote, startup growth)
PostgreSQL—more relevant than ever, by Magnus Hagander of the PostgreSQL core team. Magnus is often invited to give a talk on the latest release of PostgreSQL with his “look at the elephant’s trunk” talk series and while I love that talk, I’m eager to hear Magnus’s perspective on the relevance of Postgres. Magnus will keynote the EMEA livestream. (EMEA livestream, keynote, Postgres future)

Citus talks

You would expect to see talks about the Citus database at an event named Citus Con: An Event for Postgres. And sure enough, depending on how you categorize, about 11 or 12 of the 38 talks—about ~30%—are about the Citus extension to Postgres!

6 Citus customer talks

Citus Cluster: our zero-downtime migration story, by Antoine Hemery and Matthieu Dumont of Algolia (EMEA livestream, Citus, Azure, customer)
Loading at Hyperscale: Advanced Data Import Techniques for Citus, by Colton Shepard of TRM Labs (on-demand talk, Citus open source user)
Lessons learned scaling our SaaS on Postgres to 8+ billion events, by Jonathan Denny of ConvertFlow (on-demand talk, Citus, Azure, customer)
Lessons from Optimizing Citus Queries at Heap, by Matt Dupree of Heap (on-demand talk, performance, Citus, customer)
Data modeling, the secret sauce of building and managing a large scale data warehouse, by Min Wei of Microsoft (on-demand talk, Citus, Azure, customer)
Building geospatial apps on Postgres, PostGIS, & Citus: a case study about large scale, by Nirav Savani and Mahipal Ramidi (Americas livestream, Citus on Azure customer, PostGIS, Citus, Azure)

5 Citus engineering talks

Citus 11: A look at the Elicorn’s horn, by Marco Slot who is head of the Citus database engine team at Microsoft (EMEA livestream, Citus team, scalability, performance, latest release)
How to scale Postgres for time series data with Citus by Burak Velioglu on the Citus team at Microsoft (on-demand talk, Citus team, partitioning, sharding, timeseries)
Following Select Statements Through Citus Internals, by Onder Kalaci from the Citus team at Microsoft (on-demand talk, Citus team, planner & executor)
Efficiently distributing Postgres with Citus – How to choose the right shard key?, by Sai Srirampur of Microsoft (Americas livestream, Citus team, sharding, scale)
What I learned creating Postgres monitoring metrics for Citus on Azure, by Sena Gungor also on the Citus team at Microsoft (on-demand talk, Citus team, Postgres monitoring)

3 Ecosystem talks

A few talks are about Postgres (or Citus) along with something else in the technology stack. Of course, no Postgres story lives in a vacuum, and every Postgres story is set in the context of a broader ecosystem. Somehow I felt that these Citus Con talks—with their focus on Django, or Hathi, or PostGIS, or MobilityDB—warranted their own ecosystem section.

How secure is your database? Hacking Postgres with Hathi, by Anthony Shaw, Python and Cloud Advocate at Microsoft in Australia (APAC livestream, security, Hathi)
Big Spatiotemporal Data Management Using MobilityDB & Citus, by Mohamed Bakli of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) (on-demand talk, Postgres extensions, MobilityDB, Postgres, Citus)
Django with PostgreSQL superpowers, by Paolo Melchiorre (on-demand talk, Django, Python, contrib)

Postgres talks

There are some talks I categorize as “general” talks, that should be interesting to all sorts of Postgres people. Think of these as big picture talks that should appeal to lots of people. Then there are some Postgres talks that dive pretty deep into nitty gritty details too: I’m classifying this second set as “deep dive” talks.

2 Postgres community talks

What I learned interviewing the PostgreSQL Community, by Andreas Scherbaum one of the founding members of PGEU (on-demand talk, community, PostgreSQL Person of the Week)
Fibonacci Spirals and Ways to Contribute to Postgres—Beyond Code, by yours truly aka Claire Giordano of the Citus and Postgres team at Microsoft (APAC livestream, community, open source contributions)

15 Postgres deep-dive talks

OSSom for Better Oracle to Postgres Assessments, by Alicja Kucharczyk and Diaa Radwan of Microsoft (EMEA livestream, Oracle to Postgres, migration assessments)
Analyzing Postgres performance problems using perf and eBPF, by Andres Freund of the Postgres core team, on the Postgres open source team at Microsoft (Americas livestream, performance, perf, deep dive)
New features of the Odyssey connection pooler, by Andrey Borodin (APAC livestream, deep dive, connection poolers)
Explaining the Postgres Query Optimizer, by Bruce Momjian of EDB (Americas livestream, Postgres concepts)
Why Postgres Is Better Than MySQL for Automated Knob Tuning, by Dana Van Aken the CTO of OtterTune (on-demand talk, tuning)
Data modeling for those who want to save time and money!, by Danielle Monteiro of the Microsoft team in Brazil (on-demand talk, data modeling)
Fix your Strings in PostgreSQL, by Francesco Tisiot a developer advocate at Aiven.io (on-demand talk, data types, Postgres tips)
Lesser known features of PostgreSQL, by Haki Benita (EMEA livestream, Postgres tips)
Localization on PostgreSQL, by Keisuke Takahashi of Microsoft (APAC livestream, localization, collations, character sets)
Developing IO Prefetching for Postgres, by Melanie Plageman of the Postgres open source team at Microsoft (Americas livestream, prefetching, readahead, IO, algorithms, performance)
NO ARRAY OF SUNSHINE: an introduction to data types from a data quality perspective, by Renee Huinker (on-demand talk, data types)
Advanced INT->BIGINT Conversions, by Robert Treat (on-demand talk, data types, bigint)
Point-in-time query tuning and observability with pg_stat_statements, by Ryan Booz of Timescale (on-demand talk, pg_stat_statements, observability, tuning)
Optimizing autovacuum: PostgreSQL’s vacuum cleaner, by Samay Sharma of the Postgres team at Microsoft (on-demand talk, performance, tuning, deep dive, Postgres tips)
Queues in PostgreSQL, by Thomas Munro of the Postgres open source team at Microsoft (APAC livestream, deep dive, queues, SKIP LOCKED, locking, concurrency, transactions)

4 Azure Database for PostgreSQL talks—including customer talks too

This section includes talks about the managed service for PostgreSQL on Azure, including both customer talks and a talk by one of the PM experts about the new Flexible Server service.

Top 10 reasons to choose Flexible Server for Azure Database for PostgreSQL, by Sunil Agarwal, head of the PM team at Microsoft for Flexible Server in Azure Database for PostgreSQL (on-demand talk, cloud, Azure, Flexible Server)
Build Your Business Based Upon PostgreSQL Databases, by Bob Wuisman and Alan Palacio of Ebiquity (on-demand talk, customer, cloud, Azure, Flexible Server)
First Experiences with Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server by Johannes Schuetzner of Mercedes Benz (EMEA livestream, customer, cloud, Azure, Flexible Server)
Handle Azure PostgreSQL Auditing With Ease, by Josephine Bush (on-demand talk, pgAudit)

Mark your calendars for Citus Con: An Event for Postgres

If any of these talks are useful to you we sure hope you join us on April 12th at this free and virtual developer event. No plane tickets required. 😊

To mark your calendar for the entire duration of the event (all 3 livestreams plus intermissions in-between) just click here. Or, if you just want to attend a particular livestream, you can mark your calendar for just the Americas livestream, APAC livestream, or EMEA livestream.
Check out the schedule page to see a list of all the live and on-demand sessions.
Updated April 26, 2022: You can watch all 38 talks and the full livestream replays on YouTube.
To stay connected, if you do the Twitter thing, please follow @CitusCon on Twitter! And if this ultimate guide is useful to you, please let me know as we’d love the feedback!

Written by Claire Giordano

Head of open source community efforts for Postgres at Microsoft. Alum of Citus Data, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, and Brown University CS. Conference speaker at PGConfEU, PGConfdev, FOSDEM, PGConf NYC, Nordic PGDay, pgDay Paris, PGDay Chicago, Swiss PGDay, & Citus Con. Talk Selection Team chair for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres. Loves sailing in Greece.