Claire Giordano

If you’ve never done it before, you might be daunted by the idea of giving a conference talk. You know: the work involved, the butterflies, how to make it a good talk and not a boring one, the people who might judge you… And perhaps the hardest bit: choosing a topic others will find interesting.

The last few months I’ve been working on a new event. It’s a free and virtual developer event happening on 12-13 Apr 2022 called Citus Con: An Event for Postgres. Organized by the Postgres and Citus team here at Microsoft Azure, Citus Con is geared toward Postgres users, Azure Database for PostgreSQL customers, and those who use the Citus extension to Postgres (or other PG extensions.)

From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Kingdom (UK) government has made it a top priority to track key health metrics and to share those metrics with the public.

And the citizens of the UK were hungry for information, as they tried to make sense of what was happening. Maps, graphs, and tables became the lingua franca of the pandemic. As a result, the GOV.UK Coronavirus dashboard became one of the most visited public service websites in the United Kingdom.

The list of people who rely on the UK Coronavirus dashboard is quite long: government personnel, public health officials, healthcare employees, journalists, and the public all use the same service.

Citus 10.1 is out! In this latest release to the Citus extension to Postgres, our team focused on improving your user experience. Some of the 10.1 fixes are operational improvements—such as with the shard rebalancer, or with citus_update_node. Some are performance improvements—such as for multi-row INSERTs or with citus_shards. And some are fixes you’ll appreciate if you use Citus with lots of Postgres partitions.

Given that the previous Citus 10 release included a bevy of new features—including things like columnar storage, Citus on a single node, open sourcing the shard rebalancer, new UDFs so you can alter distributed table properties, and the ability to combine Postgres and Citus tables via support for JOINs between local and distributed tables, and foreign keys between local and reference tables—well, we felt that Citus 10.1 needed to prioritize some of our backlog items, the kinds of things that can make your life easier.

This post is your guide to the what’s new in Citus 10.1. And if you want to catch up on all the new things in past releases to Citus, check out the release notes posts about Citus 10, Citus 9.5, Citus 9.4, Citus 9.3, and Citus 9.2.

If you’ve built your application on Postgres, you already know why so many people love Postgres.

And if you’re new to Postgres, the list of reasons people love Postgres is loooong—and includes things like: 3 decades of database reliability baked in; rich datatypes; support for custom types; myriad index types from B-tree to GIN to BRIN to GiST; support for JSON and JSONB from early days; constraints; foreign data wrappers; rollups; the geospatial capabilities of the PostGIS extension, and all the innovations that come from the many Postgres extensions.

But what to do if your Postgres database gets very large?

When I gave the kickoff talk in the Postgres devroom at FOSDEM this year, one of the Q&A questions was: “what’s happening with the Citus open source extension to Postgres?” The answer is, a lot. Since FOSDEM, Marco Slot and I have blogged about how Citus 9.2 speeds up large-scale htap workloads on Postgres, the Citus 9.3 release notes, and what’s new in Citus 9.4.

Now it’s time to walk through everything new in the Citus 9.5 open source release.

Our latest release to the Citus open source extension to Postgres is Citus 9.3.

If you’re a regular reader of the Citus Blog, you already know Citus transforms Postgres into a distributed database, distributing your data and SQL queries across multiple servers. This post—heavily inspired by the internal release notes that lead engineer Marco Slot circulated internally—is all about what’s new & notable in Citus 9.3.

The last two months, I managed the agenda for our weekly Citus team meeting, the one time each week where our entire distributed team—with people spread across 6 different countries—gets together to talk about Citus things. As I chatted with our PostgreSQL folks to find speakers to give 10-minute “lightning talks”, I heard a chorus from several of the engineers: “see if you can get Joe to give a talk. His talks are always super interesting.”

I succeeded. Joe Nelson (known as begriffs online) did deliver a talk titled “Dominus SQL, lord of my domain.” And the engineers liked it. Not a surprise, as Joe’s content tends to be pretty popular, both on his personal blog, and on the Citus Data blog, including high traffic posts such as 5 ways to paginate in Postgres and Faster PostgreSQL Counting.

And when Joe agreed to let me interview him about his work on the Citus documentation (he’s quite busy so I wasn’t sure he would say yes), well, I was thrilled. This post is an edited transcript of my interview with Joe—and it’s your inside baseball view into how the documentation for the Citus open source project gets made.

As I get ready for the PgDay San Francisco event that is happening next Tue 21 January—a one-day, single-track Postgres community event at the awesome Swedish American Hall in SF—I’m reflecting a bit on how important the speakers are to developer events. Let’s face it, without speakers, there would be no conference.

And because I was on the PgDaySF talk selection committee, I’ve had some good conversations these last few months about CFPs, conference talks, how talk selection committees work, and how you can improve your chances at getting your proposals accepted. So I thought it would be useful to walk through the tips I’ve accumulated on how to get your conference talk accepted—at a Postgres conference, or at any developer conference.

These tips are premised on the notion that a good conference talk requires these 4 things:

1. interestingness: a topic people will care about—and learn from
2. knowledgeable speaker who knows their subject & can communicate effectively with an audience—so people can follow, understand, and learn
3. a hook: a compelling title & abstract that will hook people and entice them to attend
4. fits holistically into the rest of the lineup: a talk that complements the rest of the talks at the event, that adds something unique, and doesn’t overlap the other talks in a significant way

How do you know if the next update to your software is ready for hundreds of millions of customers? It starts with data. And when it comes to Windows, we’re talking lots of data. The Windows team measures the quality of new software builds by scrutinizing 20,000 diagnostic metrics based on data flowing in from 1.2 billion Windows devices. At the same time, the team evaluates feedback from Microsoft engineers who are using pre-release versions of Windows updates.

At Microsoft, the Windows diagnostic metrics are displayed on a real-time analytics dashboard called “Release Quality View” (RQV), which helps the internal “ship-room” team assess the quality of the customer experience before each new Windows update is released. Given the importance of Windows for Microsoft’s customers, the RQV analytics dashboard is a critical tool for Windows engineers, program managers, and execs.

When Django developer and Azure Postgres* engineer Louise Grandjonc confirmed that she could sit down with me for an interview in the days leading up to DjangoCon 2019, I jumped at the chance. Those of you who were in the room for Louise’s talk this week probably understand why. Louise explains technical topics in a way that makes sense—and she often uses unusual (and fun) examples, from crocodiles to owls, from Harry Potter to Taylor Swift.

And since I experience a bit of FOMO whenever I miss a fun developer conference like DjangoCon, I especially wanted to learn more about Louise’s DjangoCon talk: Postgres Index Types and where to find them.

Here’s an edited transcript of my interview with Louise Grandjonc of Microsoft (@louisemeta on Twitter.)