About
Álvaro is a passionate database and software developer. Founder of OnGres ("ON postGRES"), he has been dedicated to Postgres and R&D in databases for more than two decades.
Álvaro is at heart an open source advocate and developer. He has created software like StackGres, a Platform for running Postgres on Kubernetes; or ToroDB (MongoDB on top of Postgres), both open source projects.
As a well- known member of the PostgreSQL Community, Álvaro founded the non-profit Fundación PostgreSQL (organizer of PostgreSQL Ibiza conference) and the Spanish PostgreSQL User Group. He has contributed, among others, the SCRAM authentication library to the Postgres JDBC driver.
You can find him frequently speaking at PostgreSQL, database, Java and cloud (becoming an AWS Data Hero in 2019) conferences. In the last 10 years, Álvaro has completed more than 140 tech talks (https://aht.es).
- Some techniques may outright lie to you. ...
Postgres in the Containers Era
The Future; and the Present; is to run Postgres on Containers
presented by Alvaro Hernandez
Containers are everywhere. Whether in a code test suite, a developer's laptop, in production or CI/CD pipelines, containers have taken the deployment world by storm. Similarly, Kubernetes adoption is skyrocketing.
How does Postgres fit in this container era? Is Postgres "cloud native"?
The challenges to optimally run Postgres in containers will be explored, including the challenges associ...
more Fri 19 2024 Ops
How to measure query performance
Or, alternatively, how NOT to measure query performance
presented by Alvaro Hernandez
If you don’t know how to measure query performance in Postgres, this talk is for you.
If you know how to do it and consider it a simple and solved problem, this talk is definitely for you.
It doesn’t sound too complicated. There are several tools and techniques to report query performance. But a deeper look reveals some troubling conclusions:
Making Postgres Fly on Kubernetes
presented by Alvaro Hernandez
video
Today, running Postgres on Kubernetes is not out of the ordinary. But given all of Kubernetes capabilities, doing a 1:1 between how you run Postgres on Kubernetes and how you run it outside of it is a loss of opportunity.
The Open-Source StackGres (https://stackgres.io) project has leveraged Kubernetes API to its fullest to make Postgres not run, but fly, on Kubernetes! Join this webinar w...
more Wed 23 2021 Ops
Life without ORM: is it possible and how we can get there
presented by Henrietta Dombrovskaya, Alvaro Hernandez, Alexander Ioffe, dharshan rangegowda, Boris Novikov, and Jeremy Smith
There is no protection against bad queries. If a query is poorly written, it's execution can't be improved with any indexes, fast access path or other database advancements. What is the most common source of poorly written queries? Most of the time they do not come from humans; they are generated by applications that use ORMs to communicate with databases. What can we do to prevent it from happ...
more Development
StackGres: Cloud-Native PostgreSQL on Kubernetes
Your secret trick to have a PosgreSQL-as-a-Service in your own infra
presented by Alvaro Hernandez
An enterprise-grade PostgreSQL requires many complementary technologies to the database core: high availability and automated failover, monitoring and alerting, centralized logging, connection pooling, etc. That is, a stack of components around PostgreSQL.
Kubernetes has enabled a new model to deploy software abstracting away the infrastructure. However, containers are not lightweigh...
more Ops and Administration
Oracle to PostgreSQL Migration Tutorial
Stop paying for Larry’s boat!
presented by Alvaro Hernandez
PostgreSQL is a fully-featured, enterprise-grade and open source database, named two years in a row database of the year! And it’s also the best candidate to migrate off of Oracle, supporting very advanced SQL, easy administration and pl/pgsql, a replacement for Oracle’s PL/SQL. Stop spending hundreds of thousands or millions of $ on database licenses and reinvest them in your team, infrastru...
more Wed 18 2019 Ops and Administration
Oracle to PostgreSQL Migration Tutorial
Hands On Labs
presented by Alvaro Hernandez
Stop paying for Larry’s boat!
PostgreSQL is a fully-featured, enterprise-grade and open source database, named two years in a row database of the year! And it’s also the best candidate to migrate off of Oracle, supporting very advanced SQL, easy administration and pl/pgsql, a replacement for Oracle’s PL/SQL. Stop spending hundreds of thousands or millions of $ on database licenses and rein...
more Mon 18 2019 Ops and Administration
Tutorial on Modern PostgreSQL High Availability
BYOL -- Bring Your Own Laptop!
presented by Alvaro Hernandez and Pablo González Doval
It’s 3am. Your phone rings. PostgreSQL is down, you need to promote a replica to master. Why the h**l isn’t this automatic?
If you thought of this before, you want automatic High Availability (HA). Don’t miss this tutorial! We will enter the world of Modern PostgreSQL HA.
Good news, there are several new, “modern” solutions for PostgreSQL HA. However, there are several solutions and it's ...
more Mon 16 2018 Operations and Administration
PostgreSQL Configuration for Humans
AI tuning is not ready yet
presented by Alvaro Hernandez
PostgreSQL is the world’s most advanced open source database. Indeed! With around 270 configuration parameters in postgresql.conf, plus all the knobs in pg_hba.conf, it is definitely ADVANCED!
How many parameters do you tune? 1? 8? 32? Anyone ever tuned more than 64?
No tuning means below par performance. But how to start? Which parameters to tune? What are the appropriate values? Is ther...
more Operations and Administration
Hydra geo-redundant failover for Postgresql
geo-redundancy in Groupon
presented by Jose Cores Finotto and Alvaro Hernandez
PostgreSQL High Availability (HA) is a very desirable goal for most, if not a strict requirement. And there are technologies and literature to help provide HA on a PostgreSQL cluster.
However at Groupon we manage hundreds of database servers, distributed across several datacenters in the world. And our internal policy mandates that we need a Disaster Recovery mechanism to switch a complete d...
more Operations and Administration