Malcolm McLean

Senior Software Engineer at Evermed

About

Malcolm is a Software Engineer, PostgreSQL DBA, Linux admin, tinkerer and a bit of a pedantic perfectionist, having over 19 years of experience with PostgreSQL and somewhat more than that with Linux and development.

Malcolm McLean has presented the following presentations

    Malcolm McLean From smallint to bigint and char to varchar, it's time to demystify the data types at Postgres Conference 2025
    With so many data types, which do you use and which should you avoid?

    presented by Malcolm McLean

    PostgreSQL has dozens of different data types. Some work better than others if different stations, but which do you choose for each situation? varchar or text? int or bigint? Do you ever use money?

    This talk will run through each of the main data types to help understand when you should be using each of them

    Thu 20 2025 Essentials
    Malcolm McLean Performance tuning PostgreSQL at Postgres Conference 2025
    Tuning PostgreSQL isn't as hard as you think

    presented by Malcolm McLean

    Out of the box PostgreSQL comes with very conservative performance settings. In this workshop, we'll look at many of the options that relate to performance and how to set them for your environment, as well as query optimization, statistics, operating system parameters and server resources.

    There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but through this workshop, you'll get the fundamentals of perfo...

    more

    Tue 18 2025 Essentials
    Malcolm McLean Effectively securing your PostgreSQL database at South Africa 2019
    Are you doing enough to secure your database and access to your data?

    presented by Malcolm McLean

    Securing access to your database and data seems obvious, but are you doing enough? The default settings within PostgreSQL and even the default firewall configuration on stock Linux installs are a far cry from being secure.

    Even if you're not handling or storing credit card information, PCI-DSS defines many things to do in order to secure access to a database and operating system, which can b...

    more

    Tue 8 2019 Ops and Administration
    Malcolm McLean Postgresql performance tuning - a crash course at Silicon Valley 2019
    Tuning PostgreSQL isn't as hard as you think

    presented by Malcolm McLean

    Out of the box PostgreSQL comes with very conservative performance settings. In this 3-hour workshop, we'll look at more useful options that relate to performance and how to set them for your environment, as well as query optimization, statistics, operating system parameters and server resources.

    There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but through this workshop, you'll get the fundamentals o...

    more

    Wed 18 2019 Ops and Administration
    Malcolm McLean Effectively securing your PostgreSQL database at Silicon Valley 2019
    Are you doing enough to secure your database and access to your data?

    presented by Malcolm McLean

    Securing access to your database and data seems obvious, but are you doing enough? The default settings within PostgreSQL and even the default firewall configuration on stock Linux installs are a far cry from being secure.

    Even if you're not handling or storing credit card information, PCI-DSS defines many things to do in order to secure access to a database and operating system, which can b...

    more

    Fri 20 2019 Ops and Administration
    Malcolm McLean Performance tuning PostgreSQL at Postgres Conference
    Tuning PostgreSQL isn't as hard as you think

    presented by Malcolm McLean

    Presented as full-day training

    Out of the box PostgreSQL comes with very conservative performance settings. In this workshop, we'll look at many of the options that relate to performance and how to set them for your environment, as well as query optimization, statistics, operating system parameters and server resources.

    There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but through this workshop, ...

    more

    Mon 18 2019 Ops and Administration
    Malcolm McLean Kobus Wolvaardt Opening at South Africa 2018

    presented by Malcolm McLean and Kobus Wolvaardt

    Tue 9 2018
    Malcolm McLean Kobus Wolvaardt Panel discussion and Closing at South Africa 2018

    presented by Malcolm McLean and Kobus Wolvaardt


    video

    Tue 9 2018
    Malcolm McLean Kobus Wolvaardt Performance tuning PostgreSQL at South Africa 2018
    Tuning PostgreSQL isn't hard

    presented by Malcolm McLean and Kobus Wolvaardt

    Out of the box PostgreSQL comes with very conservative performance settings. In this talk, we'll look at some of the options that relate to performance and how to set them for your environment.

    Wed 10 2018 Operations and Administration
    Malcolm McLean A talk about indexes at South Africa 2018
    Creating and maintaning indexes in PostgreSQL

    presented by Malcolm McLean


    video

    This will be an introductory talk about indexes within PostgreSQL

    Tue 9 2018 Operations and Administration
    Malcolm McLean PostgreSQL in a geographically distributed realtime transactional system at PostgresConf US 2018
    Selectively replicating data across geographically distributed servers

    presented by Malcolm McLean

    How and why we utilise PostgreSQL, our specific requirements for replication, how we handle it, what alternatives we looked at and what we are investigating for the future.

    Our system is a geographically distributed system across multiple countries where data needs to be selectively replicated between each set of servers based on that country's legislation and failover requirements. This pos...

    more

    Thu 19 2018 Use Cases
    Kobus Wolvaardt Margrit Drescher Malcolm McLean Martin Slabber Panel discussion at South Africa 2017

    presented by Margrit Drescher, Malcolm McLean, Martin Slabber, and Kobus Wolvaardt

    Discussion on Postgres usage by the participants as well as the South African postgres landscape.

    Postgres
    Malcolm McLean Utilising PostgreSQL in a realtime transactional system at South Africa 2017
    Replicating data to a geographically distributed system

    presented by Malcolm McLean

    How and why we utilise PostgreSQL, our specific requirements for replication, how we handle it, what alternatives we looked at and what we are investigating for the future.

    We will also look at a few simple, yet interesting things we do within the database.

    Postgres
    Malcolm McLean Securing your PostgreSQL database at South Africa 2017
    Are you doing enough to secure your database and access to your data?

    presented by Malcolm McLean

    Securing access to your database and data seems obvious, but are you doing enough? The default settings within PostgreSQL and even the default firewall configuration on stock Linux installs are a far cry from being secure.

    Even if you're not handling or storing credit card information, PCI-DSS defines many things to do in order to secure access to a database and operating system, which can...

    more

    Postgres