List of videos

Varun Dhawan is a Principal Product Manager in the Azure Postgres team at Microsoft, specializing in PostgreSQL. With over two decades of experience, he has deep expertise in database systems like PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle. Varun leads initiatives aimed at enhancing cloud database technologies, improving developer experience and empowering businesses to leverage the full potential of open-source databases. Before joining Microsoft, Varun was a DevOps Engineer at Target Corp. and a Database SRE at McKinsey&Company, where he focused on improving database performance and driving cloud technology adoption. His passion for sharing knowledge is evident through his writing on his personal blog - https://data-nerd.blog/ and Azure Database for Postgres Blog, where he explores database management insights and best practices. You can follow him on twitter @iVarund or connect on https://www.linkedin.com/in/varundhawan/

As PostgreSQL becomes the database of choice for an increasing number of businesses and organisations, its community is growing exponentially. At the same time, with this rise in popularity the expectations for the database’s performance and capabilities grow as well. To meet this increased demand, we need more hands on deck—more hackers, reviewers, and contributors. More importantly, we need stronger connections, collaboration, and exchange within the community. Historically, the PostgreSQL community has been a relatively close-knit group with its own rules, communication styles, and a sense of familiarity among its members. This poses a challenge for those seeking to connect, discuss their ideas, receive support in the hacking process, and integrate within the community. In this session, I will share: * The key reasons for building a network within the PostgreSQL community and beyond. * Inspiring stories of newcomers who successfully built their connections. * Existing platforms and methods for connecting and seeking advice. * Practical ideas to start conversations at pgconf.eu, on mailing lists and in direct communication. The session will include mild interactive elements designed to encourage you to rethink “networking” and to help you interact with people in the room, at the conference, within the broader PostgreSQL community and beyond.

Let's do some basic benchmarks (both OLTP and OLAP) on releases since PostgreSQL 8.0, and see how the performance changed over the years. It's unexpectedly difficult to realize how much has the performance changed over many releases, because we usually test and measure only the two releases. But the incremental improvements can compound pretty quickly, and the hardware and applications change too. So let's do some testing and look at numbers ;-) You will not learn about how to use cool new features during this talk, but hopefully you'll learn how far we got in the past ~15 years.

To quote the baseball player Yogi Berra, "You can observe a lot just by watching." In this session, Stacey Haysler (not an engineer) will offer PostgreSQL tips learned from watching the email lists and attending conference sessions. Karen Jex (definitely an engineer) will then explain the technical reasons for the recommendations. This talk will provide helpful guidance for new users of Postgres, and useful reminders for more experienced users.

Sena Güngör Tavukçuoğlu - Smooth Sailing; How We Tackled PostgreSQL Migration Challenges from CentOS to Ubuntu (PGConf.EU 2024) With CentOS approaching its end of life, the migration of PostgreSQL servers to a more sustainable operating system has become a critical task. In this presentation, we will delve into the process of migrating all PostgreSQL servers from CentOS to Ubuntu as part of Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, focusing on the numerous challenges encountered and the strategies employed to overcome them. Prior to the actual migration, extensive validations were conducted on several clones of each cluster, testing various scenarios to ensure a seamless transition. Minimizing downtime for customers was a top priority, along with optimizing PostgreSQL performance to achieve the best possible results during reindexing on Ubuntu. This session will provide a brief overview of the migration preparation, explaining our validation approach, followed by an in-depth discussion of the specific problems faced during the migration process. Attendees will gain valuable insights into the practical solutions we implemented to address these challenges, ensuring a smooth transition for PostgreSQL instances from CentOS to Ubuntu on Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL.

In this talk, I'll discuss the incremental backup feature which I developed for PostgreSQL 17. The talk will discuss how we determine what data has changed, and why the chosen approach was selected. It will then review in some detail how incremental backups can be taken and restored, and why things work as they do. It will briefly touch on use cases for the feature and possible future work in this area.

Patrick Stählin - Finding and fixing a data-corruption bug with the help of the community (PGConf.EU 2024) We started rolling out PostgreSQL 16 earlier this year when we suddenly saw a very small percentage (0.15%) of services alerting on data-corruption. Luckily, we traced the corruption to a faulty FSM (free space map), which is easily fixable without too much downtime. This talk describes how we could leverage the help of the community in finding, mitigating and then fixing the bug. We will do a deep dive on how PG writes data to disk and what we did to fix the issue in the end. We will also learn on how to fix these specific issues without downtime or VACUUM FULL with a new function we proposed to expose in pg_freespacemap.

Ophir Lojkine & Thomas Guillemard - Unearthing the Past with PostgreSQL; How Open Source is Revolutionizing Digital Archaeology (PGConf.EU 2024) Archaeology is undergoing a digital revolution, and PostgreSQL is at the forefront. This talk explores how a team of French archaeologists leveraged PostgreSQL and PostGIS to create B.A.D.A.S.S. (Base Archaeological Data: Attributive and Spatial System), transforming their field data collection and analysis processes. We'll dive into the challenges of digitizing complex archaeological data, the benefits of spatial databases for site mapping, and how a web interface allows real-time data entry on excavation sites. We'll see how we used an open-source tool (SQLPage: https://sql.ophir.dev/) to build a full production-ready web UI on top of the database very quickly, and without any other knowledge in the team than just SQL. Join us to discover how open-source tools are helping uncover history more efficiently than ever before.

Users, roles, and permissions in PostgreSQL - it sounds like a snoozefest, right? Wrong. This dull topic is a minefield of disasters waiting to happen. One wrong GRANT and suddenly your intern has DROP privileges on your production database. Oops. In this talk, we'll navigate the treacherous waters of PostgreSQL's security model. We'll start with the basics - what's the difference between a user and a role anyway? (Spoiler: nothing, but don't tell anyone I told you that.) Then we'll dive into the nitty-gritty of permissions, from the obvious (SELECT, INSERT) to the obscure (TRUNCATE, anyone?). But wait, there's more! We'll explore the dark art of role inheritance, where permissions spread like a virus through your database. You'll learn how to create a permissions structure that anyone can understand. You'll also learn to audit your setup without going insane. By the end of this session, you'll have the tools to secure your PostgreSQL instance well. It will be tighter than Fort Knox. At least, it will be tight enough that your CEO can't accidentally delete the entire customer table. Whether you're a newbie or a seasoned DBA, you'll walk away with practical tips to make your database security less of a headache and more of a... well, slightly smaller headache.