PostgresOpen is just a few months away and our list of talks is now live and available on the PostgresOpen website. This year selecting the talks was the hardest yet not only due to the number of talk submissions, but also the across the board high quality of submissions. There is hopefully something for everyone among the talks, at least if you like Postgres that is.

If you’re thinking about joining us I’d love to see you there and buy you a beer or coffee. The conference is September 5-7 in downtown San Francisco, and early bird tickets are open for just another few weeks. If you want to save some money on tickets grab it and the room now before things jump.

But, if you’re curious for a sampling of a few of the talks I thought I’d break down my top five I’m personally most excited about:

Debugging the Postgres planner

Okay, this one immediately caught my atttention. Melanie will start with the basics of an explain plan to progress down into an actual bug within the Postgres planner, how to can debug it in Postgres, and then write a patch for a fix herself. This talk is well beyond my depth as I’ll likely never contribute code to the Postgres planner, but seems extremely entertaining and likely to highlight both performance profiling as well as useful debugging tips.

Cleaning out Crocodiles teeth with PostgreSQL indexes

I saw Louise give a super practical talk on undertanding explain this year in PgDay Paris. It was both valuable for application developers that aren’t Postgres experts as well as surfaced knowledge for those that thought they already understood explain. I’m excited to hear her take on indexes, but maybe even more excited for the storytelling that will come along with this talk. A talk that can be put to a story always becomes a bit easier to follow the journey than simply the technical facts.

How PostgreSQL extension APIs are changing the face of relational databases

I’ve said it before personally that Postgres is becoming more of a data platform than simply a relational database. Part of that is flexibility towards datatypes and the broad use cases Postgres can support from OLTP, to OLAP, to HTAP. The other big part is extensions! Extensions allow Postgres to continue to advance outside of the standard Postgres core codebase and release cycle. The list of extensions (PostGIS, HyperLogLog, pg_partman, Citus) in this talk is pretty great, and curious to hear more on the APIs themselves.

Connection Pooling 101

Okay, connection pooling has been talked about before. Yet, still SO MANY people don’t use it in production. Connection pooling can have as large of an impact as understanding explain. In this talk Samantha looks at the pros/cons of connection pooling itself with Postgres, and should provide some good guidance for getting things setup.

HOT - Understaning this important optimization update

Grant’s talk last year on tuning Postgres for high write workloads was a great one that covered not only practical tips but some of the details of how things work under the covers. This looks like a great follow-on focusing on heap only tuples and how they can greatly improve things like bloat and overal write throughput.

See you there

If you have any questions about the conference I’d be happy to answer them, though hopefully based on the short sampling of talks you have all the reason you need to join us in September.