The EDB Team was onstage in eight countries, eleven cities, and at 14 events giving 24 talks about Postgres and how to use it in the modern enterprise. The team addressed DBA questions, developer concerns, Postgres internals, business perspectives and the future vision of Postgres in a world of AI and analytics.
Many of the talks addressed well-known topics (vacuum, MVCC, partitioning, backup, indexes, and joins), while others looked at business topics, such as the collaboration between DBAs and developers; the business potential of Postgres was also addressed.
Several topics found greater emphasis in Q1:
High availability and resilience
After Postgres achieved high availability through synchronous replication in version 9.1, released in 2011, enterprises started realizing that they can rely on Postgres for increasingly important business applications. Today, Postgres can achieve 4 nines and even 5 nines (99.999%), meeting the most demanding requirements. Boriss Mejias dissects some problems that can appear in physical replication; Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek discusses the newer technology for high availability and zero downtime: logical replication in EDB’s Postgres Distributed (PGD). In Bengaluru at PGConf India Robert Haas gave a preview of how Postgres 17 (targeted for the fall of 2024) will significantly improve backup and recovery.
The internal workings of the Postgres community
At PGConf India in Bangalore, Bruce Momjian described the inner workings of the Postgres community, and how the Postgres community extends beyond the immediate focus on the software. Bruce tells us how training that he delivered at a remote university helped create a new Postgres community nexus, and how somebody from the new team then helped a few years later create yet another foothold in another country. This near-viral communal dynamic is really important to the creation of a vibrant global team. Laetitia Avrot picks that topic up at Tourraine Tech, describing how a software that has no product management, no governance, and no project managers has become #1 in the database world.
What’s next for Postgres: AI, machine learning and analytics
Postgres is the most innovative database in the world, but it will not rest on its laurels. At State of Open Con in London, Laetitia dives into what’s next and the central role that Postgres plays in a world where data is the new gold, and where it is critical to get high-value insights and predictions as fast as possible. At GoKonf in IStanbul, Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek showed us with a hands-on example how to use pgvector to create AI solutions that leverage data stored in Postgres. At PGConf India, Ashutosh Bapat showed how Postgres stretches to the data warehouse, the data lake, and the lakehouse.
The team also (co-)organized six Postgres events in Bengaluru, Boston, Brussels, Pasadena, Portland, and Prague.
Events we helped organize in January, February and March 2024
| Jan 27 | PGSQL Phriday #015, a virtual event | Laetitia Avrot |
| Feb 2 | FOSDEM PGDay in Brussels, Belgium | Boriss Mejías, Dave Page, Vik Fearing |
| Feb 15 | PDXPUG, the Portland Postgres User Group | Mark Wong |
| Feb 26 | Prague PostgreSQL Meetup | Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek |
| Feb 29 | PGConf India | Ashish Mehra, Ashutosh Bapat |
| Mar 14 | PGDay Paris | Vik Fearing |
| Mar 14 | SCALE, the Social Linux Expo in Pasadena | Mark Wong |
| Mar 27 | Boston Postgres User Group | Tom Kincaid |
Events where we spoke about Postgres in January, February and March 2024
Feb 2 - FOSDEM in Brussels
- Boriss Mejías: High availability configurations are very common for PostgreSQL. But how do you investigate performance problems when the standby can't keep up?
- Bruce Momjian: Beyond Joins and Indexes
- Tomas Vondra: Postgres vs. Linux filesystems
Feb 6 - State of Open Con 24 in London
- Laetitia Avrot: Postgres & AI: A future unleashed
Feb 7 - PGSessions in Paris
- Laetitia Avrot: Le pouvoir de Jedi des Index dans l’univers de Postgres
Feb 9 - Tourraine Tech in Tours
- Laetitia Avrot: PostgreSQL et l'Anarchie Organisée
Feb 14 - San Franciso Postgres User Group (virtual)
- Richard Yen: How to Ride Elephants Safely
Feb 17 - GoKonf in Istanbul
- Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek: PostgreSQL, vectors and AI
Feb 26 - Prague PostgreSQL Meetup
- Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek: PostgreSQL, vectors and AI
Feb 28 - PGConf India in Bengaluru
- Vibhor Kumar: Building for the future and betting big on Postgres (keynote)
- Robert Haas: Incremental Backup for PG17
- Bruce Momjian: Postgres for All Your Data
- Bruce Momjian: MVCC Unmasked
- Bruce Momjian: PG Community Involvement
- Ashutosh Bapat: Postgres for analytics
- Shruthi K C: PostgreSQL 16: What's New? A comprehensive overview of the Latest Features
Mar 12 - Nordic PGDay in Stockholm
Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek: EDB Postgres Distributed - The Flexible Database
Mar 14 - PGDay Paris
Boriss Mejías: Collaboration between DEVs and DBAs - creating a contract for long term partition maintenance in JSON
Mar 14 - SCALE, the Social Linux Expo in Pasadena
Devrim Gunduz, Mark Wong: PostgreSQL Ask Me Anything
Devrim Gunduz: VACUUM: From your head down to your shoes
Richard Yen: How to Ride Elephants Safely
Mar 21 - Kubecon Paris
Gabriele Bartolini (with Cari Singh, Google): Scaling Heights: Mastering Postgres Database Vertical Scalability with Kubernetes Storage Magic
Mar 27 - Boston PostgreSQL Users Group (BPUG)
Bill Smith: WorkShop Developing Postgres 101 : Postgres
As you can see, EDB experts work hard to participate in conferences and community events around the world: from Prague to Paris, Brussels to Bengaluru. Be sure to follow the links above to see their presentations and tap into our expertise. We attend open source events because it's important to share this knowledge and experience. More Postgres experts work at EDB than any other company and we are proud to be part of the vibrant open source community.
We are already planning to attend even more events throughout the rest of 2024 and we hope to see you there.