Postgres Conference

South Africa 2019

PostgresConf South Africa 2019

The third annual South African PostgresConf takes place in Johannesburg on 8 & 9 October 2019, with attendees representing a diverse class of professionals and companies from around the country and across the continent. This is an excellent opportunity for the database administration and developer community who use PostgreSQL to get to know each other, exchange ideas and learn about the current features and upcoming trends within PostgreSQL.

Open Source Week

Open Source Week brings 3 conferences together in the same week, with PostgresConf South Africa 2019 taking place the day after LinuxConf [ZA] 2019 and before PyConZA 2019, the Python programming conference and a shared workshop/tutorial day on the Wednesday, with all three conferences hosted at the same venue.

If you would like to be kept up to date on current and future conferences and events, consider [subscribing to our newsletter] http://eepurl.com/dD-gKD). Volumes are low, only conference related, and you're welcome to unsubscribe any time.

If you have any questions about the conference, please send us an email to organisers@postgresconf.co.za.

Some of our speakers

Hans-Jürgen Schönig

CYBERTEC PostgreSQL International GmbH

CEO

Lloyd Albin

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center

Principal Database Administrator

Charles Clavadetscher

Swiss PostgreSQL Users Group

Senior Database Enginer

Pierre Gunter

VSc Solutions

Senior Software Developer

Gavin Fleming

Kartoza and OSGeo

Director

Andrew Turpin

Cyber-Mint (Pty) Ltd

Director

Rory Preddy

Microsoft

Audience Developer

Karel van der Walt

ACPAS

Data Architect

Friedel Wolff

Tangent Solutions

Senior consultant

Conference Highlights

Oct 08 Bennie Swart

Tips and tricks for speeding up PostgreSQL in an automated testing environment

In an automated testing environment it is often a requirement to create a clean database for each group of tests, but creating and initializing new databases can be slow and resource intensive. In this talk we will look at a collection of tips and tricks to optimize the setup and teardown of new databases in an effort to significantly reduce the overall execution time of tests.

Oct 08 Friedel Wolff

Optimising full-text queries in the amaGama translation memory server

The amaGama (https://amagama.translatehouse.org/) project implements a FOSS translation memory web service built with Python on top of PostgreSQL. I recently worked on improving its performance, and would like to report on what I did and how I did it. The presentation will cover how an understanding of the problem domain, usage patterns and algorithms involved allowed for a big performance improvement despite some (arguable) shortcomings of PostgreSQL. A translation memory contains texts...

Oct 08 Gavin Fleming

PostgreSQL/PostGIS devops with Docker and Rancher

Kartoza is a South African company with a global footprint. We specialise in geospatial solutions with FOSS, which means we use PostGIS a lot. We deploy, host and support many instance of PostGIS for many clients in support of many different applications, on premise and in cloud. Some of these have replication and all have automatic backup regimes. To improve reliability and efficiency we do this now wholly with Docker and Rancher, all in the open. What we do seems to be pretty popular,...

Oct 08 Pierre Gunter

Postgres database versioning and schema migration with Git and Flyway

We use Git and Flyway to automate our schema migrations. It greatly reduces the friction of merging schema changes made by multiple developers on a project. It also produces a migration that is consistent across environments as well as allowing us to run additional environment specific scripts as part of the migration.

Oct 08 Lloyd Albin

AutoVacuum - Tuning and Monitoring

I was recently asked by another PostgreSQL DBA about what could be causing queries to run slow while their application is running but then runs fast again after the application is stopped. While I have given several presentations on this subject, each one has been on a specific cause and not talking about all of them together. I decided I would compile them into a single tuning and monitoring presentation. These slow queries are reported to me by my developers when they start taking...

Oct 09 Gavin Fleming

Working with spatial data in PostGIS

Kartoza is a South African company with a global footprint. We specialise in geospatial solutions with FOSS, which means we use PostGIS a lot. We also present courses on PostGIS. This workshop is a condensed version of what we normally do in two or three days. You will get hands-on experience with loading spatial data, understanding geometries and using spatial data in analysis. In the process you will learn all about spatial SQL and also how to use a desktop GIS (QGIS) to interact with the...

Oct 09 Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Finding and fixing slow queries

Your database is performing badly but you got no idea why. Fortunately PostgreSQL has all the means to figure out what is really going on inside your database. You just have to find the right modules and use the right tools and understand what PostgreSQL is really trying to tell you. This talk will show you how to track down slow queries using pgstatstatement, work with "explain analyze" and fix bad performance using simple query rewrites.

Oct 09 Hans-Jürgen Schönig

An introduction to PostgreSQL security

PostgreSQL security is an important topic and the database offers a variety of features to protect your data. This training will teach you security from the ground up and cover aspects such as network security, authentication, database side permissions, row level security, security barriers as well as some additional tooling. At the end of the day you will be able to configure and manage a productive, enterprise grade system.