About

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 at Tembo, striving to help make Postgres the distributed cluster-aware platform he knows it can be!


Shaun Thomas has presented the following presentations

    Shaun Thomas What's our Vector, Victor? at Seattle 2024
    Taking the pain out of AI with pg_vectorize

    presented by Shaun Thomas

    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...

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    Wed 6 2024 Dev
    Shaun Thomas Kubernetes Killed the High Availability Star at Seattle 2024
    How to stop worrying and embrace Postgres in the cloud

    presented by Shaun Thomas

    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...

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    Thu 7 2024 Ops
    Shaun Thomas Upgrade Techniques Through the Ages at Postgres Conference 2020
    From Dump / Restore to Logical and Beyond

    presented by Shaun Thomas

    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...

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    Ops and Administration