Archive for December 2025

In the spirit of fun and creativity, we offer this whimsical view of operations excellence. No matter what holidays you observe—or if you observe none at all—we hope this season brings you time for bonding, joy, and repose. Happy holidays from the Postgres Conference team. 

Let's talk about the greatest operations professional of all time: Santa Claus.

Think about it. Every December 24th, Santa executes a global deployment with a one-night SLA. Zero downtime tolerance. No rollback option. The whole world is watching, and failure is not an option. His operations credentials are impeccable:

Global Distribution Network. Billions of deliveries across every time zone in a single maintenance window. Try explaining that SLA to your stakeholders.

Real-Time Monitoring. He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake. Santa's observability game is unmatched. He knows if you've been bad or good—that's behavioral analytics at scale.

Massive Database Management. The naughty/nice list is a production database with billions of records, updated continuously throughout the year. Annual refresh cycle. No data loss. Ever.

Failover Systems. Remember when the weather nearly took down Christmas? Rudolph wasn't just a reindeer with a shiny nose. Rudolph was a failover solution implemented under pressure. That's incident response.

Capacity Planning. Cookies and milk at every stop. Presents for every child. Sleigh weight distribution. Santa doesn't wing it. Santa has a plan.

Workforce Management. Elves are working year-round across multiple workshops. Reindeer training programs. Quality assurance on every toy. That's operational excellence.

The Ops Track at Postgres Conference: 2026

If Santa ran PostgreSQL, he'd be attending—or presenting at—the Ops track.

The Ops track at Postgres Conference: 2026 is for everyone managing PostgreSQL in production. You'll learn from practitioners sharing hard-won operational wisdom. Topics include:

• Deployment strategies and automation
• Monitoring and observability
• Performance tuning
• Backup and recovery
• High availability and replication
• Capacity planning
• Security hardening
• Automation and orchestration
• Managing PostgreSQL at scale

Postgres Conference 2025 Ops Track Highlights

Listen or watch sessions from the Postgres Conference 2025: Ops Track on YouTube.

Register for Postgres Conference: 2026

Postgres Conference: 2026 takes place April 21-23 in San Jose, California. The theme is Energizing People with Data and Creativity. Nothing says creativity like keeping production databases running smoothly under pressure. 

Early bird registration is available now! Purchase your General Admission tickets here. 

Call for Postgres Conference 2026 Speakers & Trainers

Want to share your expertise? If you like managing PostgreSQL in production and can help others learn from your operational experience, we want to hear from you. The CFP is open across all tracks. Share what you've learned.

CFP closes January 30, 2026. Submit here. 

Core PostgreSQL knowledge compounds over time. Understanding data types, indexing strategies, query optimization, and transaction behavior provides value regardless of framework, application architecture, or PostgreSQL version.

The Essentials track at Postgres Conference: 2026 is dedicated to core PostgreSQL knowledge. If it's in the documentation or should be, this is where we explore it thoroughly.

This isn't beginner content. Every core concept has complexity worth understanding.

What You'll Learn in the Essentials Track

Data types beyond the basics. PostgreSQL's type system includes arrays, JSONB, ranges, and custom types that solve problems other databases punt to the application layer. Learn how to leverage these types effectively.

Indexing strategies that actually work. B-tree, GIN, GiST, BRIN, and hash indexes each exist for specific reasons. Understand when to use which, how to read EXPLAIN output, and when indexes hurt more than they help.

Query optimization fundamentals. Go beyond adding indexes. Understand the query planner, statistics, joins, and execution strategies to write performant queries from the start.

Transaction isolation in practice. MVCC, isolation levels, and locking behavior aren't just academic concepts. Learn how they affect real applications and how to prevent production incidents.

Documentation deep dives. PostgreSQL's documentation is legendary, but dense. Sessions in this track surface buried knowledge and make it actionable.

Topics in the Essentials Track

• Data types deep dives (JSONB, arrays, ranges, custom types)
• Indexing strategies and trade-offs
• Query optimization and EXPLAIN analysis
• Transaction management and isolation
• Constraints and data integrity patterns
• Configuration and tuning fundamentals
• Backup, restore, and recovery basics
• Security fundamentals
• SQL features that PostgreSQL does better
• And more!

Postgres Conference 2025 Essentials Track Highlights

Check out how presenters tackled complex PostgreSQL topics and get a preview of what to expect in 2026. Listen and watch Essentials track highlights in our Postgres Conference YouTube playlist.

Register for Postgres Conference: 2026

Postgres Conference 2026 takes place April 21-23 in San Jose, California. The theme is Energizing People with Data and Creativity. Understanding the fundamentals gives you the foundation to be creative.

Early bird registration is available now! Purchase your General Admission tickets here. 

Call for Postgres Conference 2026 Speakers & Trainers

Want to share your expertise? If you like to dive deep into PostgreSQL fundamentals and can help others understand them, we want to hear from you. The CFP is open across all tracks. Share what you've learned.

CFP closes January 30, 2026. Submit here. 

On May 12, 2025, something remarkable happened in Montréal. The Postgres Extension Developers Coalition (“PGDEC”) hosted Postgres Extensions Day Montréal 2025 as a free, full-day event to provide a forum for extension developers to discuss challenges and solutions. The PGEDC seeks to identify and address limitations within the current Postgres extension framework, advocating for improvements and new features that would benefit the extension ecosystem.

The Postgres community responded with overwhelming enthusiasm through insightful presentations and engaging hallway discussions. You can watch the entire Postgres Extensions Day 2025 Montreal event on the PGDEC YouTube channel below:

This enthusiasm wasn't new. At previous Postgres Conferences, extension sessions have been consistently well-attended. Nearly all the pgvector sessions at the 2026 conference in Orlando were at capacity.

Standing Room Only: The Extension Community Speaks

Sessions like "Postgres.pm: Packaging Manager Magic" by Yurii Rashkovskii, "1 Billion Row Challenge: Comparing Postgres, DuckDB, and Extensions" by Ryan Booz, and "Understanding Database Statistics and Extensions in PostgreSQL" by Ranjan Burman drew significant interest. The message was clear: the community craves extension content.

Why Extensions Matter

Extensions are PostgreSQL's superpower, as they transform a database into an even more robust platform. Need vector similarity search for AI applications? Install pg_vector. Building location services? PostGIS has you covered. Time-series data? TimescaleDB. Horizontal scaling? Citus. The ecosystem includes over 300 extensions, each solving real problems every day.

The Challenges Extension Developers Face

• But extension developers face unique challenges:
• Maintaining compatibility across PostgreSQL versions is complex
• Distribution and packaging strategies vary wildly
• Security considerations multiply when you're extending core functionality
• Testing becomes exponentially harder
• The community is fragmented, as maintainers of different extensions rarely connect in person

Postgres Extensions Day Montréal 2025 proved that extension developers need a dedicated space. Not a 20-minute talk squeezed between database administration sessions or surface-level overviews.

The standing-room-only sessions at Postgres Conference 2025 validated this need, so we're extending Extensions Day quite literally to Silicon Valley. On April 23, 2026, Postgres Conference brings the proven Montreal format to the West Coast with enhanced reach and integration.

Where Innovation Actually Happens

Why does this matter? Because extensions are where PostgreSQL innovation happens. Core database development moves carefully and deliberately. Extensions move fast — they innovate, address edge cases, and push boundaries.

Extensions Day embodies Postgres Conference 2026's theme: "Energizing People with Data and Creativity." Extension developers are the creative force transforming data possibilities.

Extension developers deserve recognition, technical depth, and community support. Extensions Day at Postgres Conference 2026 provides all of this and more.

Your Moment to Connect

The extension community has spoken. From standing-room-only sessions at conferences to the overwhelming response in Montréal, the message is clear: extension developers need their own space. They've been working in isolation, solving similar problems independently, waiting for their moment to connect.

That moment is now.

Watch what happened in May, and see the community that's forming. Then answer the call by bringing your extension expertise to San Jose. Your challenges, your solutions, and your insights matter. The ecosystem needs your ideas, your voice, and your creativity!

What We're Looking For

Topics we’re looking for:

• Operating extensions in production
• Teaching extension development
• Extension packaging and delivery
• Libraries and frameworks for extensions
• Gaps and challenges
• Implementing extensions in different languages
• Interesting techniques, discoveries, and lessons learned
• Extensions security
• Anything related to Postgres extensions

Share your extension expertise at Extensions Day at Postgres Conference 2026. Submit your proposal here before the CFP closes on January 30, 2026.

Interested in attending? Early Bird Registration is now open! Learn more at the blog post and register today!