Citus Blog

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.

How do you feel when your day doesn’t go as planned? In this episode of the Path To Citus Con, the podcast for developers who love Postgres, guest Derk van Veen joins co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to talk about his journey from Java developer to Postgres specialist.

What makes you feel alive at work? Is it the routine tasks, the predictable outcomes, the stable environment? Or is it the unexpected challenges, the unknown variables, the chaotic situations? If you are like Derk (and I), you thrive on the latter. Maybe you love to jump on tough problems and find beautiful solutions—or maybe you enjoy the thrill of finding the root cause of a slow system or some faulty code. You don't just follow a recipe. You ask questions, explore options, and experiment with different strategies. How do you partition a table? Why do you partition a table? What are the trade-offs of each approach?

The PGConf.dev CFP closes on Monday, January 15 at 11:59pm PST, so if you want to speak at the inaugural PGConf.dev, submit a proposal!

PGConf.dev is the new PostgreSQL Development Conference, the successor to PGCon, a Postgres contribution-focused conference that took place every year in Ottawa. Pronounced "Pee-gee-conf-dot-dev", the inaugural year of PGConf.dev will take place in beautiful Vancouver, Canada, on May 28-31, 2024—with many of the same conference features that made PGCon so great:

• sessions covering Postgres hacking and contribution
• full-day Unconference geared toward collaboration and impromptu creativity
• opportunities to brainstorm with others interested in Postgres development in the “hallway track”

What type of talks is PGConf.dev looking for? The CFP page for PGConf.dev has more details, but, in short: session proposals on all topics related to contributing to Postgres and how to ensure Postgres continues to be the best open source relational database on the planet.

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.

Version 3 of the “Activity Book for Postgres” is hot off the press. And you can get your own copy if you come say hello at the Microsoft booth at the PGConf NYC and PGConf EU conferences in 2023. The Activity Book will also be available at other Postgres meetups and smaller PGDay events that our team attends throughout the year (and it was one of the giveaways at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres earlier this year, too.)

Whether you have kids, or nieces, or nephews—or perhaps you yourself find coloring a useful way to distract your hands while your mind tackles complex problems—you can likely put the book to good use. And who doesn’t like a good bad database joke?

In this post, you’ll find out about the inspiration for the book, as well as the hidden meaning behind each of the pages—and a way to request your own copy.

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>”.

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.