PostgreSQL Europe Conference 2024

This years conference took place in Athens, Greece from October 22nd until October 25th.
It has been the biggest European PostgreSQL conference so far with more than 780 attendees.

I am very proud that my company, ProOpenSource OÜ, has sponsored each PostgreSQL Europe Conference since the company has been founded.

Tuesday 22nd of October

PGEU Diversity Committee

It has been the first ever in person meeting of the PGEU Diversity Committee, which has been founded this year, a couple of months ago.
We discussed what we think would be the next things on the todo list.
More information about the goals can be found at Diversity.

One of the actual achievements is, we had a Diversity Celebration Board for the first time. Karen Jex organized all and every item for that board.

In addition Karen Jex brought with her the new diversity logo as stickers. The logo has been designed by her daughter. I attached one to my notebook lid. Karen Jex also gave every member of the committee a personalized sticker with their name on it. Thank you for your great work, Karen.

Extension Ecosystem Summit

I attended the Extension Ecosystem Summit. David Wheeler announced he had started working on the next PGXN, thanks to support of Tembo.
PGXN is the PostgreSQL extension network. The place to go to find a lot of good extensions, that are enhancing PostgreSQL with new features, data types, foreign data wrapper, etc.

PGXN is not under the roof of the PostgreSQL governance. IMHO that is a great mistake. PGXN would get more awareness if it would be under the roof of PostgreSQL.

Some developers gave talks about their PostgreSQL extensions. As usual I learned something new. I will go into that in detail in another post.

Afterwards have been some good dicussions and knowledge sharing about extensions and why it is sometimes hard to maintain them. In case you don’t know, I am taking care of three extensions.

Wednesday 23rd of October

Talks Highlights

The first conference day started with the opening talk by Magnus Hagander. Afterwards Stacey Haysler gave her keynote talk The PostgreSQL License Fee, it has been recorded and you should watch the video, when it is available on Youtube.

Valeria Kaplan gave her talk connection_builder for PostgreSQL community, which is not a technical talk, but about community building.

Another great talk has been Sparta’s Dual Kingship and PostgreSQL Active-Active by Boriss Mejías, as funny and informative as all of his talks I attended.

The image has been taken by Claire Giordano ©, thank you for allowing me to use it.

Social Event

In the evening we had a social event at the venue with some great food and drinks.

Floor Drees pushed me into doing something Halloweenish, here it is:

Thursday 24th of October

Talks Highlights

The PostgreSQL Security: From Attack Simulation to Defense talk by Taras Kloba is very important. From practical experiences I do know, that lots of PostgreSQL installations have never been secured. But that is setting all your data at risk of beeing stolen and missused.

Karen Jex and Stacey Haysler gave their talk PostgreSQL Observed—and Explained with guidance for new people and reminders for the more experienced ones.

Sweet Surprise

Cornelia Biacsics from CYBERTEC PostgreSQL International GmbH gave me a nice sweet, take a look how georgius it is, and it tasted good.

Social Event

For the evening Jimmy Angelakos organized a karaoke event in a rock bar, he support and encouragement by Floor Drees. They even had Belgian beer there, also my favourite one, Chimay Bleu.

All who attended had a great and funny evening, thanks for organizing, Jimmy.

Friday 25th of October

Talks Highlights

In Supporting extensions, but really now Floor Drees talked about the state, and what hopefully might come, in the PostgreSQL extension eco system.

In What’s in a Postgres major release? An analysis of contributions in the v17 timeframe Claire Giordano presented a lot of statistics about what has been going on in the PostgreSQL ecosystem in that timeframe.

Rafia Sabih explained in a very good graphical way the PostgreSQL Executor: Executing your execution plan.

With Postgres Platform “Best Practices” for the Modern DBA Chelsea Dole shared a lot of knowledge about things to take care no matter whats your title for mangling with databases is.

Tomas Vondra must have invested a lot of time, to prepare his talk Performance Archaeology, he compared performance improvements being achieved since PostgreSQL 8.0.

Dave Page and Magnus Hagander closed the conference with their usual So long, and thanks for all the fish. And as they haven’t been able to tell us, where the next PostgreSQL Conference Europe will take place, we have to wait for the announcement.

Conclusion

It has been, again, a great conference with lots of phantastic talks. I met several PostgreSQL community members, which I can proudly call friends. To meet them again is always a pleasure. Friday has obviosly been the day where I attended more talks.
I have also met customers and former co-workers who I have been able to get them to the PostgreSQL conferences.
And, as usual, I met new people and had great discussions.

Big thanks go out to all who helped organizing the conference and to all speakers.

Your next chance to meet me at a conference is PGDay/MED 2024 in Napoli, Italy, on December 5th. I have been honored to be on the Program Committee.

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Author: Stefanie Janine Stölting