Debra Cerda Blog Posts

Postgres Conference 2025 in Orlando, held March 18–21, brought together PostgreSQL professionals from around the world for a week of deep technical learning, professional development, and intentional networking. With expanded tracks and thoughtfully curated sessions, this year’s gathering balanced core database expertise with a growing focus on holistic professional growth.

Event Highlights

• Expanded Tracks: In addition to the core DevOps, and Essentials tracks, the conference introduced Professional Development and Variants & Cloud tracks. These additions reflected the complexity of today’s tech environments and the evolving needs of those who manage them.

• Keynote Address: Malika Boukhelifa’s keynote, “Code Your Way Out of Burnout,” addressed the role of mental health in sustainable tech careers and provided attendees with strategies for long-term success.

• Technical Deep Dives: Popular sessions on pg_vector, analytics with DuckDB, and PostgreSQL partitioning strategies demonstrated the community’s interest in advanced features and real-world applications.

• Professional Development: The new track featured sessions on leadership, communication, and soft skills. Certified Wellness Coaches were also available onsite, offering support and tools to help attendees prioritize mental wellness alongside technical growth.

• Community and Networking: Conversations flowed freely in workshops, hallway meetups, and evening events like the tropical-themed buffet. The size and format of the event allowed for stronger peer connections and genuine knowledge exchange.

This year’s more focused format was intentional. The smaller scale fostered deeper discussion, better engagement, and more actionable takeaways. Whether tackling database replication or burnout prevention, attendees walked away with tools they could apply immediately. We would not be able to accomplish this without the generous support of our sponsors and partners.

Looking ahead, we plan to cap attendance in future years to preserve the quality and depth of the experience. Postgres Conference is no longer designed to be the largest event. Its goal is to be the most effective.

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Are you interested in learning about the latest developments and best practices in PostgreSQL? 

Then you won’t want to miss next week’s Postgres Conference Silicon Valley 2023! This annual conference brings together experts and enthusiasts from around the world to share their knowledge and experiences with the PostgreSQL community.

This year's conference will be held in San Jose April 20 and 21, 2023, at the San Jose Hilton, and promises to be another exciting and informative event. Attendees can expect a wide range of presentations, mini-tutorials, and networking opportunities, covering Postgres and open source related topics such as high availability, migration, security, machine learning, AI and much more.

Whether you're a seasoned PostgreSQL developer, a database administrator, or just curious about this powerful open-source database system, Postgres Conference Silicon Valley is the perfect place to learn and connect with like-minded individuals.

So why should you attend? For starters, you'll get to hear from some of the brightest minds in the PostgreSQL community. You'll learn about the latest trends and technologies, and gain valuable insights from real-world use cases and case studies. Check out our full program.

In addition, you'll have the opportunity to network with other PostgreSQL professionals and enthusiasts, and build relationships that can benefit you and your organization long after the conference is over. 

Be sure to stop by the exhibit area and chat with our incredible sponsors and partners, including our Conference sponsors CoreDB and Amazon Web Services (AWS) as well as our Cloud sponsor Google Cloud and Distributed SQL Summit (DSS) sponsor YugabyteDB. Our Conference Partners for this year include Airbyte, Command Prompt, Inc., DBeaver, Fujitsu, Neon, Nutanix, Percona, pgEdge and Community Partner OnGres.

Postgres Conference Silicon Valley is also a great chance to explore the local area, with plenty of opportunities for sightseeing, dining, and entertainment. A Welcome Reception will be hosted by YugabyteDB on Thursday evening for all registered attendees. 

So if you're looking to expand your knowledge of PostgreSQL, connect with other experts and enthusiasts, and have some fun along the way, be sure to register for Postgres Conference Silicon Valley today. We can't wait to see you there!

The Postgres Conference 2025 is set to take place in Orlando, Florida, from March 18 to 21, 2025. This year's conference features an expanded lineup of tracks, including the Dev Track, which is tailored for developers seeking to deepen their expertise in PostgreSQL. This track offers sessions to enhance your development skills, explore new tools, and provide practical insights into PostgreSQL's capabilities.

What to Expect

The Dev Track is curated to address the diverse needs of developers working with PostgreSQL. Attendees can look forward to:

• In-Depth Tutorials: Hands-on sessions that delve into advanced PostgreSQL features and development practices.
• Expert-Led Workshops: Opportunities to learn from seasoned professionals about optimizing performance, implementing machine learning, and more.
• Cutting-Edge Topics: Discussions on the latest tools, extensions, and methodologies in the PostgreSQL ecosystem.

Session Highlights

Here are some standout sessions in the Dev Track:

• A Practical Guide to Set-Based Queries (paid training)

  • Speaker: Aaron Cutshall
  • Date & Time: March 18, 2025, 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM
  • Description: This workshop addresses performance issues arising from procedural code in PostgreSQL. Aaron will guide participants through transforming procedural logic into efficient set-based queries, enhancing database performance.
    
    

• Machine Learning using PostgreSQL (paid training)

  • Speaker: Abbas Butt
  • Date & Time: March 18, 2025, 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM
  • Description: Abbas will introduce participants to implementing machine learning algorithms directly within PostgreSQL 15.x using Apache MADlib 2.1.0 installed on Ubuntu 22.04. The session covers practical applications of predictive analytics, enabling developers to harness the power of ML in their databases.
    
    
• From MongoDB to Postgres: Building an Open Source Standard for Document Databases
  
  • Speaker: Peter Farkas
  • Date & Time: March 19, 2025, 4:00 - 4:20 PM
  • Description: This session reviews the current state of document databases, and demonstrates how Postgres handles MongoDB workloads with ease.

For a comprehensive view of all sessions and to plan your itinerary, visit the official conference schedule.

Why Attend?

Participating in the Dev Track at Postgres Conference 2025 offers numerous benefits:

• Skill Enhancement: Gain practical knowledge and hands-on experience with PostgreSQL's advanced features.
• Networking Opportunities: Connect with fellow developers, industry experts, and thought leaders.
• Stay Current: Keep abreast of the latest developments, tools, and best practices in the PostgreSQL community.

Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your PostgreSQL development skills. Register now and join us in Orlando for an enriching experience.

Pavan Deolasse is a PostgreSQL consultant for 2ndQuadrant, one of our Platinum Sponsors for PostgresConf US 2018. Learn more about Pavan in this Community Profile:

Pavan Deolasee is a contributor to the development of PostgreSQL and related technologies. He holds a Masters of Technology in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and has several publications to his credit.

Pavan was introduced to PostgreSQL in the year 2006 when he started working for a PostgreSQL company. Hacking PostgreSQL was a completely new experience, but by accepting help from the community -- especially Simon Riggs, his mentor -- he began working through the code and was soon working on a very important project (Heap-Only-Tuple aka HOT). It was a very complicated piece of work, yet one of the landmark features in PostgreSQL and to this day remains one of his most important contributions to the project. Pavan has since contributed several patches to PostgreSQL. 

HOT was committed to PostgreSQL in 2008 and Pavan has continued to stay fully engaged with the project. In 2009/2010, alongside other colleagues, Pavan started work on Postgres-XC, a distributed, shared-nothing, clustering solution based on PostgreSQL. He was involved in designing the high-level architecture of the solution, and later wrote many important pieces of the code such as the GTM, the GTM Proxy, the 2PC transaction controller at the coordinator, changes required to guarantee global consistency of the data, and many distributed planner and executor pieces.

When Postgres-XL, a fork of Postgres-XC, was released to the public in 2014, Pavan once again became involved with the project and has been leading the development of Postgres-XL ever since. 

Pavan joined 2ndQuadrant not long after in April 2015, and once again started working with long time colleagues and friends; he and 2ndQuadrant have continued to actively work on the development of Postgres-XL. The focus area of development has been stability and performance of the product while keeping the fork as close to open source PostgreSQL as possible. The most recent release (Postgres-XL 10) supports intra-datanode query parallelism, thus taking distributed query processing to the next level.

In 2013, Pavan and two of his colleagues started the India PostgreSQL User Group. They started conducting small meet-ups, in order to promote the technology in India and bring the local community together. These small gatherings have now expanded with a membership of over 600 members, and into a full scale conference: PGConf India, Asia's largest PostgreSQL conference with more than 250 people in attendance each day in 2018. 

As part of the 2ndQuadrant team of PostgreSQL developers, Pavan continues to work on many interesting new features. He is an active part of the production support team and also has the opportunity to investigate interesting customer problems, often leading to important and critical bug fixes to the open source project.

Pavan had this to say about his involvement with the project:

“I love PostgreSQL and the PostgreSQL community, so you will continue to see me around.”

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2018, learn more about the engaging content and our speakers for this year in our Speaker Spotlight Series.

Elizabeth Zalman is the Co-founder & CEO of strongDM, the definitive data security product. Previously she was Co-Founder and CEO of the cross-device profile company Media Armor.

Liz will be presenting a breakout session "Do You Know Your Vendor Dependencies" on Wednesday, April 18, at 4 pm. Read what she has to say about Postgres and why to attend her session: 

Why PostgreSQL? What got you into it, and made you stick with it?

Featureful performance & proven reliability. Over the years I've found fewer and fewer reasons to consider alternatives beyond Postgres (two notable exceptions being redis-style KV and queues).

Tell us about your involvement with the greater Postgres community.

strongDM hears a lot about how its customers use PG and its derivatives (Greenplum, the latest on Aurora, etc.) and we love sharing tips when appropriate.

What new features of PostgreSQL 10 are you most excited about?

As a security product, we're always happy to see security-related upgrades: SASL/SCRAM authentication is a popular option in several of database systems, and is a significant upgrade over the previous salted hashes. We also rely heavily on partitioning, so all related enhancements are welcome.Finally: although we generally wouldn't choose to run parallel queries in a primarily OLTP system, the promise of running analytic queries on a replica (rather than ETL'ing into an analytic database) is very appealing.

What features should be developed/improved and released in the next major upgrade?

Dynamic optimization for queries on partitioned tables. Right now if you run select * from date_partitioned_table where event_timestamp between NOW() and NOW() - interval '7 days'; It scans every partition because the result of NOW() is not knowable ahead of time. But it could optimize that query when it was asked to execute it. Instead of creating a static query plan it could say, I know I'm going to have to compute a list of partitions. So, let's just remember that. Then right before the query runs, it could calculate the list and run the query as though it had been planned with a static date range, and thus only query the affected tables. 

 Why should attendees come to your talk at PostgresConf US 2018?

In this talk, I'll share practical examples of breaches I've personally experienced along with advice on how to hold your vendors accountable, and hopefully make the topic of security a little less intimidating in the process.

What sessions are you most excited about attending at PostgresConf US 2018?

I am looking forward to attending “Reducing the Surface Area of Risk in Data Security” by Tim Gorman and “General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with Azure Database for PostgreSQL” by Mark Bolz.

What is your favorite aspect of PostgresConf US?

Being able to network with and learn from a unique community! I’ve found practice to really be one of the best ways to learn about databases.

 What advice would you have for a Computer Science graduate or entry level developer who are interested in learning and engaging with Postgres? 

 I’ve found practice to really be one of the best ways to learn about databases. Get your hands dirty: try breaking things and then fixing them! 

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2018, and buy your tickets soon!

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2018, learn more about the engaging content and our speakers for this year in our Speaker Spotlight Series.

Jignesh Shah is Product Manager for Amazon RDS with Amazon Web Services. At AWS he works on PostgreSQL engines at AWS including Amazon RDS PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility. He has worked with PostgreSQL since 2005 and has released application and database lifecycle products using PostgreSQL at appOrbit and VMware.

Jignesh will be co-presenting the full day "Amazon Relational Database Service for PostgreSQL and AWS Database Migration Service Training" on April 17 at 9 am, as well as the "Deep Dive into the RDS PostgreSQL Universe" session on Friday, April 20 at 9:50 am. 

Read what he has to say about Postgres and why to attend his session:

Why PostgreSQL?

Features, Open Source, License!

Tell us about your involvement with the greater Postgres community.

Involved since 2004ish. Early part focussed more on performance on high end servers. (Performance bottlenecks, working to resolve them in standard PostgreSQL) Lately more as an advocate.

What new features of PostgreSQL 10 are you most excited about?

Pub/Sub Logical Replication

What features should be developed/improved and released in the next major upgrade?

CALL Procedure (multi-transaction), SQL Packages

Why should attendees come to your talk at PostgresConf US 2018? What would you like for them to take away from your session?

Learn about the features in Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and how best to leverage them!

What sessions are you most excited about attending at PostgresConf US 2018?

Keynotes!, Tutorials (Aurora, DMS), Customer sessions!

What is your favorite aspect of PostgresConf US?

Meeting the user community of PostgreSQL

What advice would you have for a Computer Science graduate or entry level developer who are interested in learning and engaging with Postgres?

Start with the use cases. Learn how PostgreSQL supports these use cases. Dive deeper on why PostgreSQL solves them in that particular way!

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2018, and buy your tickets soon!

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2018, learn more about the engaging content and our speakers for this year in our Speaker Spotlight Series.

Abbas Butt is a Software Architect at EnterpriseDB, and he will present a half-day training "Deep dive into PostgreSQL Authentication Methods" on Monday, April 16, at 1 pm. Learn more about Abbas and his involvement in the Postgres community:

Why PostgreSQL?

My company's business revolves around PostgreSQL.

Tell us about your involvement with the greater Postgres community.

I have been involved with PostgreSQL for about 10 years. Over the years I have contributed by reporting bugs and developing various FDWs. I have also worked to make PostgreSQL an XA complaint database by using a modified version of pgBouncer. My next plans are to come up with small programming exercises with solutions to accompany this book http://www.interdb.jp/pg/ ("The Internals of PostgreSQL for database administrators and system developers"  by Hironobu Suzuki). This will give the readers hands on experience.

What new features of PostgreSQL 10 are you most excited about?

Declarative table partitioning & query parallelism

What features should be developed/improved and released in the next major upgrade?

Write Scalability and High Availability

Why should attendees come to your talk at PostgresConf US 2018? What would you like for them to take away from your session?

Attendees should come to have great time learning about PostgreSQL authentication methods. After attending the session the attendees will be better placed to decide which authentication scheme should they use and why.

What sessions are you most excited about attending at PostgresConf US 2018?

"Aurora PostgreSQL Tutorial and Extended Deep Dive" and "Know your meme: Develop a webapp using Google Cloud Kubernetes and Cloud SQL"

What is your favorite aspect of PostgresConf US?

Being able to listen and exchange point of views with other community members.

What advice would you have for a Computer Science graduate or entry level developer who are interested in learning and engaging with Postgres?

Read this book : "The Internals of PostgreSQL for database administrators and system developers"  by Hironobu Suzuki.

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2018, and buy your tickets soon!