FOSDEM 2023

FOSDEM 2023

Recent weekend the first in person FOSDEM since 2020 took place. There has also been a FOSDEM PGDay on Friday with some very interesting talks.

At The PostgreSQL Booth

There has been a booth at FOSDEM organized by PostgreSQL Europe, where I volunteered.

Questions Being Asked

Multiple Writable PostgreSQL instances

What me really surprised has been several people asking about “multi-master”.
First of all, could people please adopt a better name like, for example, multi-primary?

None of these people really came up with an explanation, why they might need a multi-primary solution at all. After a short talk with one of them, I convinced him, that he wouldn’t need it all. All that was really needed here would be high availability. Something that can easily be achieved with Patroni, which I recommended.

There are some multi-primary solutions based on PostgreSQL available, the only one I would recommend, if at all, would be the solution by EDB, BDR. It is not available as open source, but it does come with good support, which is something you will need.

How To Handle Data in different Physical Locations

Another interesting talk has been with someone, who wanted to have stored data in different countries, but would like to access them as being in one location. The obvious solution here is the PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrapper, short fdw.
With that fdw, you can connect to every PostgreSQL instance, that you could reach. Using views, or even materialized views you can combine data, that is located elsewhere.

Merchandise Stuff

We ran out very fast of our beloved small Sloniks, a big box of them have been gone on the first day before lunch.

Also the small umbrellas went away fast, especially as it has been raining on Saturday morning.

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Author: Stefanie Janine Stölting