Shaun Thomas
Senior Software Engineer at pgEdge
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!
Upcoming presentations
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Past presentations
Always Online or Bust
Performing Zero Downtime Postgres Upgrades
Postgres major version upgrades are a lot of work! Before you start reaching for that handy pg_upgrade utility and accepting the inevitable downtime as part of the equation, let us describe a Better Way™. You didn’t set up an entire High Availability cluster just to shut it down for an upgrade, did you? Of course not!
Postgres 10 introduced native logical replication, and in doing so, secret...
Mar 20 2025
What's our Vector, Victor?
Taking the pain out of AI with pg_vectorize
AI is a hot topic right now, and for good reason! Natural Language Search and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) are two great ways to leverage data stored in Postgres in an immediately useful way. Why use Full Text Search when we can search for intent and related topics?
Actually doing it on the other hand is a huge pain. We need to choose an embedding model to vectorize the data, t...
Kubernetes Killed the High Availability Star
How to stop worrying and embrace Postgres in the cloud
Doing High Availability with Postgres is hard. So hard that even the experts get it wrong due to unforeseen edge cases. Quorum, CAP and PACELC theory, fencing, STONITH, network partitions and split brains, RPO, RTO, SLA, sync and async replication, node count and architecture, proxies, connection pools, load balancers... And then there's the tools! EFM, repmgr, Patroni, Stolon, pg_auto_fail...
Upgrade Techniques Through the Ages
From Dump / Restore to Logical and Beyond
Back in my day we suffered the crushing hardship of dump and restore, hours of downtime both ways, and we liked it! Wait... no we didn't! Thankfully things have advanced since then, and we'd like to talk about it. Along the way, we'll cross every milestone up to fully online major version upgrades.
There are even rumors of mixed-version operational clusters for truly zero-downtime u...