Claire Giordano

With so many Postgres conferences coming up soon, it seemed fitting to share some highlights from a past episode of the Path To Citus Con about why to give talks at Postgres conferences. This episode was recorded back in May 2023 and shares an hourlong conversation between some wonderful Postgres engineers—Álvaro Herrera and Boriss Mejías—along with my co-host Pino de Candia and me.

The guests both have deep roots in the community—Álvaro as a Postgres committer and Boriss as a frequent conference speaker as well as the organizer for the PgBE PostgreSQL User Group Belgium. And they have known each other for decades, since university days. As much as Alvaro and Boriss have in common, it’s interesting to hear them talk about their totally different approaches to giving talks at conferences.

There’s also a point in the podcast where we explore whether it helps to be an introvert, or an extrovert, when it comes to giving conference talks. And how speaking at conferences can make it easier to meet people… after you’ve given a talk, people will often walk up to you and say “hey I saw your talk, I want to ask you about <insert PG topic here>”.

On one of the Postgres community chat forums, a friend asked me: "Is there a blog post that outlines all the work that is being done on Postgres at Microsoft? It's hard to keep track these days."

And my friend is right: it is hard to keep track. Probably because there are multiple Postgres workstreams at Microsoft, spread across a few different teams.

In this post, you'll get a bird's eye view of all the Postgres work the Microsoft team has done over the last year. Our work includes some pretty significant improvements to the Postgres managed services on Azure, as well as contributions across the entire open source ecosystem—including commits to the Postgres core; new releases to Postgres open source extensions like Citus and pg_cron; plus ecosystem work on Patroni, PgBouncer, pgcopydb. And more.

The topic of this month's PGSQL Phriday #011 community blogging event is partitioning vs. sharding in PostgreSQL. It seemed right to share a perspective on the question of "partitioning vs. sharding" from someone in the Citus open source team, since we eat, sleep, and breathe sharding for Postgres.

Postgres built-in "native" partitioning—and sharding via PG extensions like Citus—are both tools to grow your Postgres database, scale your application, and improve your application's performance.

What is partitioning and what is sharding? In Postgres, database partitioning and sharding are techniques for splitting collections of data into smaller sets, so the database only needs to process smaller chunks of data at a time. And as you might imagine, work gets done faster when you're processing less data.

In this post, you'll learn what partitioning and sharding are, why they matter, and when to use them. The table of contents:

A developer friend of mine prefers to read about what to expect at upcoming events in the narrative form of a blog, rather than having to click in and out of different abstracts on a schedule page.

So this ultimate guide post is my gift to those of you who want to know more about the 37 talks that will be presented at this year’s 2nd annual Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2023—and who want to read about it in blog post form.

And yes, Citus Con is virtual again this year! This means you can watch all the livestream & on-demand talks from the comfort of your very own desk—and chit-chat in the virtual hallway track on the #cituscon channel on Discord.

[Update in May 2023]: It's a wrap! The categories in this ultimate guide will help you find the talks which are most useful to you and your work/interests. Or you can jump straight to the playlist of all 37 Citus Con 2023 talks on YouTube.

So what’s on the schedule at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2023, exactly? Be sure to check out both tabs on the Schedule page, both the Live Sessions & the On-Demand Sessions tabs, to learn about the:

For those of you looking to give a talk at a Postgres conference, some good news: the CFP is open for Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2023. Citus Con is a free and virtual developer event happening next April, hosted by the Postgres and Citus teams at Microsoft.

Carpe diem, as the CFP will close on Feb 5, 2023 at 11:59pm PST.

Videos of all of the Citus Con talks will be published online for the world to see, including on YouTube—so the reach of your talk is not limited to the day of the event.

Because it’s a virtual event, you won’t need to travel to give your talk. And you don’t need to worry about the process of recording your talk: the organizers take care of the video recording and production—all you need is a decent webcam and microphone. You can see from the playlist of last year’s Citus Con talks that the production values of the videos are quite good.

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.

When you find yourself answering the same questions again and again, it’s a good idea to blog about it. Which is why this post about Citus Con: An Event for Postgres exists: to answer your questions, and share the news about this first-ever, inaugural event.

Citus Con: An Event for Postgres is a free and virtual developer event happening in April 2022, organized by the Postgres and Citus team here at Microsoft. Speakers will come from different parts of the Postgres ecosystem, including Postgres users, Citus open source users, Azure Database for PostgreSQL customers, and developers/experts in PostgreSQL and Postgres extensions, like Citus.

The Call for Proposals (CFP) for Citus Con is open until Feb 6th. Whether this will be your 1000th conference talk or your very 1st, we’d love to see what Postgres experiences you have to share.

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.

[Updated for 2023]: For the 2nd year in a row, I’m the co-chair of a free and virtual developer conference called Citus Con: An Event for Postgres. Wearing my talk selection team hat, as I reached out to spread the word about the CFP for Citus Con, people would sometimes ask:

Why give a talk at a Postgres conference?

This post will walk you through the ways you, your team, your project—and especially the Postgres community—can benefit from a talk you give.

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.