Craig Kerstiens: PGConf Silicon Valley - A look at the Postgres themes

PGConf Silicon Valley , November 14-16, is barely under a month away and it’s shaping up to be another great conference this year. Last year we had over 300 attendees to make it one of the larger Postgres conferences around, and this year we’re expecting even more. While we’ve had the schedule online for a few months now, we thought it might be interesting to take a step back and see if any strong themes emerged. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were a few strong themes that start to tell a bit of a story of some of Postgres recent momentum as well as future direction. Here’s a look at a few of the strong themes that are highlighted at the conference:

NoSQL and Postgres

Postgres has had some form or another of NoSQL support stretching back for years to hstore or even the XML datatype. Then cameJSONB, which is extremely flexible and can also be performant. Given all the excitement around it, it’s no suprise there’s a lot of great talks, but all are not only touting the benefits of JSONB. Some talks will take a hard look at trade-offs as well as benefits of JSONB vs. other systems for similar problems. Just a few that will touch on Postgres and when it makes sense for NoSQL:

Databases and Capitalism - Postgres & NOSQL Designing The Right Schema To Power Heap Are NoSQL Databases more reliable? Extensions

And while Postgres continues with each major release to make a number of improvements, there are a lot of advancements in the form of extensions. Postgres extension APIs make it possible to add lots of rich functionality to Postgres, without having to have code committed to core. This year we have a strong line-up of talks that surface some of the power of these extensions , which should only continue to grow as an ecosystem over time:

PGLogical - The Logical Replication for PostgreSQL Tutorial Multi-tenancy Designing for Scale with Citus Pg_paxos: Table Replication through Distributed Consensus Postgres internals

Of course no Postgres conference would be complete without a number of committers talking about all the interesting internal aspects of Postgres. If you’ve ever wanted to learn how things work under the covers here’s your chance. Just a few of our personal favorites include:

Sort vs. Hash a duality In-core compression: How to shrink your database size in several times Understanding Autovacuum

Whether you’re an application developer, DBA, or just love Postgres, we expect you’ll find the line-up and conference as a whole a great time to learn and dig into Postgres. Grab your ticket , and we’ll see you there, and if you have any questions on sponsorship or otherwise about the conference please reach out.