PGDay Lowlands 2025 and Getting Postgres to the Next Level

Obligatory photo from PGDay Lowlands 2025 talk. Credit: honkingelephant.com

I recently attended 🇳🇱 PGDay Lowlands 2025, an awesome PostgreSQL Community Event which took place on September 12th in the wondrous environment of the Rotterdam Zoo. It was a fantastic and focused day of PostgreSQL content, made all the more memorable by being in the company of amazing fish, sea turtles, and penguins!

Obligatory sea turtle photo from PGDay Lowlands 2025

I was honoured to kick off the conference, presenting a talk that I co-wrote with Hettie Dombrovskaya. We've been collecting material and ideas for this for over a year, and it was exciting to finally share it.

The talk: How Do We Get Postgres to the Next Level?

Another obligatory photo from PGDay Lowlands 2025 talk. Credit: honkingelephant.com

Our presentation, "How Do We Get Postgres to the Next Level?", was a call to action to think strategically about the future of the project. We argued that to continue its incredible growth and solidify its leadership position, we need to focus on three core pillars: improving code quality, strategically adding new features, and kicking into overdrive our advocacy and community growth. We touched on the need for things like a dedicated performance team, a more modular development process, standardization on what PostgreSQL compatibility means, and improving the developer experience to attract new contributors.

Sparking the Conversation

Packing over a year's worth of research into a 20-minute talk was a challenge, but our main goal was to spark a conversation. Based on the reaction, I think we succeeded! The ideas were received positively, and as we'd hoped, they also challenged some existing perspectives.

What was most rewarding were the hours of "hallway track" discussions that followed. It was fantastic to hear that so many of our points resonated with attendees. A recurring theme in these conversations was a shared sense that for Postgres to continue scaling, we have to bring more people into the fold. To do that, it's clear we must improve the developer experience and make it easier for new contributors to get involved.

The positive reception has inspired us to think about what's next. It seems the logical next step would be formalize the roadmap we proposed and continue this discussion at more events. Fostering these conversations is important for the health of the project, and I'm excited to see where we can take them. Hopefully, we can continue the momentum in Riga at PGConf.EU 2025!

Next Stop: Riga⛪

I'm very excited to announce that we're taking one of the key ideas from our talk, standardization, and turning it into a dedicated, hands-on session at the PGConf.EU 2025 Community Events Day.

The organizers of "Establishing the PostgreSQL standard: What's Postgres compatible?"

Along with Hettie and Boriss Mejías, I'm organizing a half-day working session on Tuesday, October 21st called "Establishing the PostgreSQL standard: What's Postgres compatible?".

As PostgreSQL's influence grows, the ecosystem of "Postgres-compatible" derivatives is expanding, which brings challenges like brand dilution and feature fragmentation. Our session aims to tackle this head-on by bringing the community together to define a practical framework for what "PostgreSQL compatible" really means. This will be a focused, technical working session where we'll break into groups to discuss key areas like core SQL behavior, ABI stability, and compatibility with standard backup and replication methods.

The goal is to emerge with a preliminary roadmap for establishing a meaningful compatibility standard. This will build directly on the conversations started in Rotterdam, and I'm very excited to collaborate with the community and leaders in the Open Source world outside our Project, to help shape the future of the ecosystem.