Claire Giordano

Some of you have been asking for advice about what to submit to the CFP for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025. So this post aims to give you ideas that might help you submit a talk proposal (or 2, or 3) before the upcoming CFP deadline.

If you’re not yet familiar with this conference, POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 is a free & virtual developer event now in its 4th year, organized by the Postgres team at Microsoft.

I love the virtual aspect of POSETTE because the conference talks are so accessible—for both speakers and attendees. If you’re a speaker, you don’t need travel budget $$—and you don’t have to leave home. Also, the talk you’ve poured all that energy into is not limited to the people in the room, and has the potential to reach so many more people. If you’re an attendee, well, all you need is an internet connection.

The CFP for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres will be open until Sunday Feb 9th at 11:59pm PST. So as of the publication date of this blog post, you still have time to submit a CFP proposal (or 2, or 3, or 4)—and to remind your Postgres teammates and friends of the speaking opportunity.

The TL;DR of this blog post is simple: the “Path To Citus Con” podcast for developers who love Postgres has been renamed—and the new name is Talking Postgres.

And if you’re just hearing about the Talking Postgres podcast for the first time, it is a monthly podcast for developers who love Postgres, with amazing guests from the Postgres world who talk about the human side of Postgres, databases, and open source.

Listening to the Talking Postgres podcast is the next best thing to being in the hallway at a Postgres conference, eavesdropping on other people’s conversations and learning from the experiences of experts. As Floor Drees says, it’s as if you’re sharing a coffee with them.

Past podcast guests include (in order of appearance) some amazing Postgres, database, and open source people such as:

Now in its 3rd year, POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024 is not only bigger than previous years but some of my Postgres friends who are speakers tell me the event is even better than past years. Sweet.

Formerly called Citus Con (yes, we did a rename), POSETTE is a free and virtual developer event happening Jun 11-13 that is chock-full of Postgres content—with 4 livestreams, 42 talks, and 44 speakers.

And while POSETTE is organized by the Postgres team here at Microsoft, there is a lot of PG community involvement. For example, 31 of the 44 speakers (~70%) are from outside Microsoft! We have also tried to be quite transparent about the talk selection process used for POSETTE 2024, if you’re curious.

On the schedule, the add to calendar links (in upper right of each livestream's tab) are quite useful for blocking your calendar—and the calendar appointments include a link to where you can watch the livestreams on the POSETTE site.

So what exactly is on the schedule for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024? A lot! When you look at the schedule page, be sure to check out all 4 tabs, so you don’t miss all the unique talks in Livestreams 2, 3, and 4.

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.

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.

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: