Let’s Build a Postgres Extension!
Presented by:
Shaun Thomas
Shaun has spent decades working in the Postgres ecosystem, specializing in architecture and high availability. His "PostgreSQL High Availability Cookbook" serves as a treatise to the lessons he learned over that time. Perhaps you've read something from his PG Phriday blog series over the years?
Currently he serves as a Senior Software Engineer and Postgres SME at pgEdge, striving to help make Postgres the distributed cluster-aware platform he knows it can be!
No video of the event yet, sorry!
Have you ever executed a query and wondered: how much RAM will that use? The documentation explains that each query node can allocate a copy of work_mem, but there’s no way to know how much that will be before or even after a query runs aside from literally counting the nodes by hand following an EXPLAIN.
What if there was an extension that supplied a function to parse a query and report how much RAM it would use? Or a parameter which would log the amount of RAM a query required during execution, perhaps even noting if any steps spilled to disk? What else could it do? Well you’re in luck, because this presentation will explain all of the prerequisites and Postgres internals necessary to make such a Postgres extension a reality. You’ll learn how the Postgres codebase operates step-by-step, and hopefully how to build your own extension by the end.
Let’s face it, Postgres and its wide ecosystem can’t quite do everything… yet! Until then, it’s our job as developers to add functionality until Postgres is truly the Swiss Army Chainsaw we know it can be!
- Date:
- Duration:
- 50 min
- Room:
- Conference:
- Postgres Conference: 2026
- Language:
- Track:
- Postgres Extensions Day
- Difficulty:
- Medium