PGConf.EU 2023 — Unforgettable moments and how we rocked the house!

This year, the 13th annual PostgreSQL Conference Europe (PGConf.EU for short) took place from December 12th to December 15th in the beautiful Central European city of Prague.

Before the main conference begins, there is a full day of training delivered by expert PostgreSQL professionals from all over the industry.

Then, the conference was kicked off impressively by Simon Riggs's opening keynote "The Next 20 Years of PostgreSQL", and even newcomers to Postgres could immediately tell that this is a database powerhouse that is getting more compelling every day. The key take-away was that there's still lots of work to be done to drive wider adoption of PostgreSQL but also that there is a massively dedicated and passionate crowd of people willing to work to that end (even "retired" folks like Simon)!

Simon Riggs on stage delivering the opening keynote

The first thing that was different this year was the number of attendees, and we broke every record with over 700 confirmed in attendance!

Magnus Hagander presenting a slide that shows 720 registrations

My personal highlights:

1. Hosting the second in-person PostgreSQL Community Panel session at a PGConf.EU with some awesome Postgres experts:

  • Alicja Kucharczyk (Program Manager — Azure Database for PostgreSQL at Microsoft) — Twitter: @StiepanTrofimo
  • Henrietta Dombrovskaya (Database Architect at DRW, Chicago PostgreSQL User Group Local Organizer) — Twitter: @HettieDombr
  • Jonathan S. Katz (Principal Product Manager - Technical at AWS, PostgreSQL Core Team Member) — Mastodon: @jkatz05@fosstodon.org, Twitter: @jkatz05
  • Stephen Frost (CTO at Crunchy Data, PostgreSQL Major Contributor) — Twitter: @net_snow

Our topic was "Postgres at scale: Dealing with challenging workloads" and we got to hear awesome performance tips and insights, as well as a quick-fire "anti-patterns we love to hate" round! Let's make this a tradition!

Photo of me having too much fun at the Community Panel (by Claire Giordano) Photo of the 4 panellists (by Floor Drees)

Interest areas:

  • Very large datasets / tables
  • High transaction rate
  • Extreme concurrency
  • Problematic data types
  • Applications using anti-patterns

You can get an idea of the topics discussed from these background slides:

2. Release of PostgreSQL 16 Administration Cookbook and signing event:

In a spectacular effort co-ordinated by publisher Packt, we released the PostgreSQL 16 Administration Cookbook! — this link gets you 15% off during December 2023:

PostgreSQL 16 Administration Cookbook cover

I was very glad to meet up with my co-authors Gianni Ciolli, Boriss Mejías, Vibhor Kumar and Simon Riggs:

Obligatory group photo of the PostgreSQL 16 Administration Cookbook co-authors (by Sabine Schatzer)

And I was beyond humbled to participate in the crazy signing event for our book, graciously hosted at the EDB booth:

Signing the PostgreSQL 16 Administration Cookbook (photo by Sabine Schatzer)

It was incredible to see your support for our book 💗 and I hope it will be a useful resource for the Postgres community!

Long queue for the PostgreSQL 16 Administration Cookbook signing event (photo by Sabine Schatzer)

3. Google Summer of Code

I was also fortunate this year to be able to mentor Rajiv Harlalka for Google Summer of Code 2023, and his PostgreSQL contribution was working to improve the pg_statviz PostgreSQL extension I created. In his talk, he shared his journey as a GSoC Contributor and a new member of the PostgreSQL community!

Obligatory GSoC selfie (by Pavlo Golub)

Rajiv and fellow student Akshat Jaimini made the (very) long trip from India to present at the conference, and we couldn't be happier to meet them there in person and hear their stories.

Rajiv Harlalka speaking on stage at PGConf.EU (photo by Boriss Mejías)

4. Other talks

Unfortunately, as I was hosting some of the conference rooms, I wasn't able to attend all the talks that I wanted to, but: Good news! For the first time at a PGConf.EU, there was video recording of the sessions so everyone will be able to catch up with the ones they missed!

Among the great talks that I was able to attend were:

(Slides available from talk links)

Of course, the Sponsor Keynotes by CYBERTEC CEO Hans-Jürgen Schönig, EDB CEO Kevin Dallas, Microsoft Group Program Manager for Postgres on Azure Charles Feddersen and Ubicloud co-founder and co-CEO Ozgun Erdogan.

And last but not least, the Lightning Talks!

Lightning talks at PGConf.EU 2023

Many thanks to the organisers, fellow volunteers and speakers of PGConf.EU for holding what is now the premier PostgreSQL event in the world. Leaving Prague was bittersweet because of the amazing PostgreSQL community, the most helpful and supportive one I've ever been a part of. I always wish there was more time to speak to and meet more people, but then again, there's more community events next year!