Ultimate Guide to POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, 2024 edition (2024)

There’s something “accessible” about virtual events

As much as many of us 🧡 in-person Postgres events—I just returned from PGConf.dev 2024 in Vancouver which was so much fun¹—I am also a big fan of the accessibility of the virtual format.

• Why? Because not everybody can travel to in-person conferences: Not everyone has the budget (or the time, or the schedule flexibility). So it’s rewarding to collaborate with all these knowledgeable speakers to produce video talks you can watch from the comfort of your very own desk. With espresso (or tea) in hand.

Speaking of accessibility, let's talk captions. All the talk videos published on YouTube will have captions available in 14 languages. The POSETTE team QA’s and fixes the English captions first and then generates the translated captions based on the improved baseline version.

• Captions available in 14 languages: Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish

So much gratitude for all these POSETTE speakers

The raison d’être for most conferences is to learn from each other—and in particular, to learn from the speakers. So before diving into this Ultimate Guide we want to say thank you to all of the amazing the speakers who have brought so much knowledge and enthusiasm to POSETTE this year.

Figure 2: Headshots from the amazing Postgres experts who are speakers in this year's event.

TIP about Speaker Interviews: Some of the speakers submitted speaker interviews. So if you want to know more about these Postgres experts, just click on the links to their talks below and you’ll be taken to their speaker page, which includes the talk abstract, a link to the livestream schedule, links to any past POSETTE talks—plus the speaker interview, if they submitted one!

Gratitude for our Livestream hosts too

There is a fun lineup of Postgres people from inside and outside Microsoft to co-host the 4 livestreams, including Boriss Mejías, Claire Giordano (that’s me) Floor Drees, Jelte Fennema-Nio, Krishnakumar (KK) Ravi, Melanie Plageman, and Pino de Candia.

Big +1 to all these folks for volunteering their time and their commentary to hosting the livestreams.

How to watch the POSETTE livestreams?

Each of the 4 livestreams has its own Add to calendar link which should be easy to find on that Livestream’s tab on the POSETTE Schedule.

And when you use the Add to calendar links to block your calendar, the calendar invites include instructions on:

• WHERE to watch the livestreams: POSETTE event homepage
  • TIP: be sure to reload the POSETTE homepage on the day of the event, so you’re not viewing some cached older version of the page or a replay of a previous livestream.
• WHERE to check out the schedule = POSETTE schedule page

How to participate in the official back-channel for POSETTE?

• WHERE to join the virtual hallway track = #posetteconf channel on the Microsoft Open Source Discord.

You can join the channel now, no need to wait, that way you’ll be all setup before the conference.

What’s the benefit to you of joining the virtual hallway track, also known as the “official back-channel”? Most of the speakers have signed up to be available on the virtual hallway track whilst their talks are being livestreamed. So it’s your opportunity to ask speakers questions—and to be part of the conversation, and make some Postgres friends.

Figure 3: Join the virtual hallway track before, during, and after the Livestreams to be part of the POSETTE conversation. Most of the speakers have signed up to be on the #posetteconf channel whilst their talk is being livestreamed so it's a good chance to ask questions and go deeper.

Will the recordings be available after the event?

Yes! All the POSETTE talks will be published online on YouTube after the event is over, so you can watch all 42 talks at your convenience, on your own schedule—even at 2X speed. With captions available in at least 14 languages.

Still, we hope you join us during the actual livestreams to be part of the live text chat.

Now let’s explore the different categories of talks you’ll see at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024.

Figure 4: Overview of the different categories of talks in POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024, a free and virtual developer event full of Postgres talks—from the nerdy to the sublime.

4 amazing Keynotes, one for each livestream

Each of the 4 POSETTE livestreams has its own invited keynote. The keynote speakers were hand-selected and invited to come tell their story at POSETTE. We're so happy they said yes—and that they will be sharing their open source, developer, cloud, and community experiences with us.

• Livestream 1 Keynote by Charles Feddersen: All The Postgres Things at Microsoft, POSETTE edition
• Livestream 2 Keynote by Regina Obe: The Open Source Geospatial Community, PostGIS, & Postgres
• Livestream 3 Keynote by Sarah Novotny: Why I love open source development & what I learned from K8s
• Livestream 4 Keynote by Thomas Munro: A Walking Tour of PostgreSQL

7 AI-related talks

With everything happening with pgvector and Postgres, it’s not a surprise that there was a plethora of AI talk submissions at this year’s POSETTE. In the end, we landed on 7 AI-related talks.

In alphabetical order by talk title:

• 6 things you can do with azure_ai & PostgreSQL on Azure, by Denzil Ribeiro (livestream 3, AI, azure_ai, AzureDBPostgres, Flexible Server, pgvector)
• Advancing Drug Search with PostgreSQL and Azure AI, by Taras Kloba (livestream 4, ai, azure_ai, AzureDBPostgres, customer)
• From Postgres full text search to Retrieval Augmented Generative search, by Adam Wølk (livestream 2, ai, AzureDBPostgres, rag)
• pgvector for Python developers, by Pamela Fox (livestream 3, ai, ecosystem, pgvector, python, orm, psycopg, demo)
• Postgres-powered AI: Running an End-to-End AI Platform with Postgres on Azure, by Jaehyun Sim of Ikigai Labs (livestream 1, ai, AzureDBPostgres, customer)
• Semantic search with Django, PostgreSQL, & pgvector, by Paolo Melchiorre of 20tab (livestream 4, AI, django, ecosystem, pgvector, python)
• Vector data in Postgres - how's it different from “normal” data?, by Heikki Linnakangas of Neon (livestream 2, AI, data types, HNSW, postgres, pgvector)

15 Postgres core talks

Lots of Postgres goodness here. In alphabetical order by talk title:

• Beyond Joins and Indexes, by Bruce Momjian of EDB (livestream 3, prolific presenter, query optimizer, tips)
• Even JSONB In Postgres Needs Schemas, by Chris Ellis of Nexteam (livestream 2, customer, json, schemas)
• Everything you need to know about Postgres Row Level Security, by Paul Copplestone of Supabase (livestream 1, security, startup)
• Hazards of logical decoding in PostgreSQL, by Polina Bungina of Zalando SE (livestream 4, cdc, logical decoding)
• How/Why to Sweep Async Tasks Under a Postgres Table, by Taylor Troesh (livestream 3, queues, Postgres as a platform)
• Partitioning your Postgres tables for 20X better performance, by Derk van Veen of Adyen (livestream 4, customer, joins, partitioning, performance, tips)
• Postgres Storytelling: What’s going on with Synchronous Replication?, by Boriss Mejías of EDB (livestream 2, Postgres storytelling, replication, WAL)
• PostgreSQL Partitioning: Slicing and Dicing for Performance and Easier Maintenance, by Ryan Booz of Redgate (livestream 2, maintenance, partitioning, performance)
• PostgreSQL performance tips you have never seen before V2.0, by Hans-Jürgen Schönig of CYBERTEC (livestream 4, performance, tips)
• PostgreSQL physical replication - internals, latest development and opportunities, by Krishnakumar (KK) Ravi and Melih Mutlu (livestream 3, replication, WAL)
• Revitalizing Outdated Data Models with PostgreSQL Views, by Newvick Lee of Careteam Technologies (livestream 3, data modeling, postgresql views)
• Scaling the Wall of Text: Logging Best Practices in PostgreSQL, by Richard Yen of EDB (livestream 1, logging, performance, security, tips)
• Tuning Parameters in Postgres vs. Tuning Your Queries, by Henrietta Dombrovskaya of DRW (livestream 1, performance, query tuning)
• Where do the performance cliffs come from?, by Tomas Vondra of EDB (livestream 4, performance, performance cliffs, query optimizer)
• You Don't Need a Database Backup Policy, by Karen Jex of Crunchy Data (livestream 4, backups, disaster recovery, DR)

8 Postgres ecosystem talks

“Ecosystem” is the “E” in the middle of POSETTE. In alphabetical order by talk title:

• Accelerating PL/pgSQL Code Conversion When Migrating to Postgres, by Deepak Mahto (livestream 2, pl/pgsql, migrations, Oracle to Postgres)
• Comparing Postgres connection pooler support for prepared statements, by Jelte Fennema-Nio (livestream 1, connection poolers, pgbouncer, odyssey, pgcat, supavisor)
• Data-intensive PostgreSQL: Three ways to scale, by Marco Slot of Crunchy Data (livestream 2, analytics, citus, extensions, it depends, performance, pg_partman, SaaS, scalability)
• The Open Source Geospatial Community, PostGIS, & Postgres, by Regina Obe of Paragon Corporation and PostGIS PSC (livestream 2, community, geospatial, KEYNOTE, postgis)
• Lessons Learned from benchmarking and profiling distributed PostgreSQL, by Lotte Felius, a PhD Student in the Database Architectures group at CWI (livestream 2, benchmarking, citus, extensions, performance, ycsb)
• SaaS on Rails on PostgreSQL, by Andrew Atkinson, author of High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails (livestream 1, citus, extensions, multi-tenancy, rails, ruby, saas)
• State of the Postgres Extension Ecosystem, by David Wheeler of Tembo (livestream 1, extensions, pgxn)
• Vindicating ZFS with PostgreSQL: Unleashing the Power of Scalability, by Federico Campoli (livestream 4, file system, storage, zfs, zol)

8 Azure Database for PostgreSQL talks

• All The Postgres Things at Microsoft, POSETTE edition, by Charles Feddersen (livestream 1, AzureDBPostgres, cloud, community, conferences, KEYNOTE, open source)
• Autotuning PostgreSQL on Azure Flexible Server, by Luigi Nardi of DBtune (livestream 4, AzureDBPostgres, machine learning, performance, query tuning, self-driving database)
• HA and DR at a glance with Azure Database for PostgreSQL, by Silvano Coriani (livestream 2, AzureDBPostgres, DR, HA, multi-region DR, PaaS)
• Making Postgres inserts faster on Azure, by Gayathri Paderla (livestream 1, AzureDBPostgres, performance)
• Tales from the Field - Oracle to PostgreSQL migrations, by Adithya Kumaranchath (livestream 3, migrations, Oracle to Postgres)
• Using Azure Query Store to Understand PostgreSQL Performance, by Grant Fritchey of Redgate (livestream 3, AzureDBPostgres, performance, query store, query tuning)
• What Enterprises like about Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server, by Kanchan Bharati (livestream 1, AzureDBPostgres, cloud, enterprise)
• What Makes Azure Database for PostgreSQL Great for Developers?, by Varun Dhawan (livestream 3, AzureDBPostgres, cloud, developers, extensions, ecosystem)

4 Postgres community talks

• A Walking Tour of PostgreSQL, by Thomas Munro (livestream 4, community, KEYNOTE, open source, postgres history, postgres contributor story)
• How to Work with Other People, by Jimmy Angelakos and Floor Drees (livestream 2, collaboration, community, neurodiversity, open source, people)
• Open Source Contributions to Postgres: The Basics, by Elizabeth Christensen of Crunchy Data (livestream 1, contributing to postgres, community)
• Why I love open source development & what I learned from K8s, by Sarah Novotny (livestream 3, collaboration, community, kubernetes, open source)

Please tell your friends & mark your calendars for this year’s POSETTE

If you are into PostgreSQL and into continuous learning, join us on Jun 11-13. No travel required.

• Livestream 1: on Tue Jun 11 from 8:00am – 2:00pm PDT (UTC -7) with 11 unique talks (add to calendar / link to Livestream 1 schedule)
• Livestream 2: on Wed Jun 12 from 8:00am – 2:00pm CEST (UTC +2) with 11 unique talks (add to calendar / link to Livestream 2 schedule)
• Livestream 3: on Wed Jun 12 from 8:00am – 1:30pm PDT (UTC -7) with 10 unique talks (add to calendar / link to Livestream 3 schedule)
• Livestream 4: on Thu Jun 13 from 8:00am – 1:30pm CEST (UTC +2) with 10 unique talks (add to calendar / link to Livestream 4 schedule)
• Virtual hallway track is in the #posetteconf channel on the Microsoft Open Source Discord. You’re invited to pop in, say hello, and ask questions.
• Opportunities for cool SWAG: There will be chances to snag sticker swag for those who join the livestreams—plus a cloud skills challenge for those who are into Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

And if you do the social media thing and want to help spread the word about the POSETTE livestreams to your friends and networks, you can follow @PosetteConf on X/Twitter to stay connected—or you can follow us on Mastodon or also on Threads.

Final thank you’s

And while this blog post has already thanked the 44 speakers and 7 livestream co-hosts, it’s time to thank everyone at Microsoft involved in organizing POSETTE 2024 especially the organizing chair Teresa Giacomini. And immense gratitude to the talk selection team without whom we wouldn’t have this amazing roster of talks.

We hope you get a lot of value out of POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024. Happy learning!