A Committer's Preview of PGConf.EU 2016 - Part 1

Only one week left til PGConf.EU in Tallinn, Estonia!

Next week will be PGConf.EU’s 8th conference, having traveled to many different parts of Europe, and lately moving on a North-East trajectory, two years ago in Madrid, last year in Vienna, is now in Tallinn, Estonia with another fantastic line-up of talks.

Here are the talks which I am most interested in this year.  Warning for the unwary, I’m a PostgreSQL Committer, so I tend to be quite developer heavy when it comes to my talk selections.

First off, if you are interested in training, and can manage to find a slot, Hans-Jürgen Schönig’s Detecting Performance Problems and Fixing Them looks to be a fantastic all-day training class.

On to the regular talks, in the first slot on Wednesday are three great talks, my first pick going to David Steele (full disclosure: who also works for Crunchy Data) for his talk on Reviewing PostgreSQL Patches for Fun and Profit.  David ran for PostgreSQL 9.6, as Commitfest Manager, what is generally accepted as the toughest Commitfest for any PostgreSQL release- the last one.  If you are interested in helping to get new features into PostgreSQL, this is the talk to be at.  A close second, and more in line with your typical DBA’s role, is Christophe Pettus’s talk Unclogging the VACUUM.  Most any PostgreSQL DBA will agree that understanding VACUUM is key to understanding how to get the best out of PostgreSQL (and, perhaps more importantly, how to avoid the worst).

In the next slot is Stella Nisenbaum’s Becoming an SQL Guru, which I strongly encourage anyone who isn’t deeply in with Common Table Expressions (CTEs), Lateral joins, or Windowing Functions or other advanced SQL to attend.  SQL is the language you use to talk to the database- learn to talk SQL at a college level instead of early secondary school level.  On the flip side is Petr Jelinek’s fantastic talk on PGLogical, where he talks about the latest and greatest in logical replication, an excellent alternative to binary replication for many use-cases.

Following lunch on Wednesday is Alexander Korotkov’s talk on The Future is CSN, which I tend to agree with and hope to attend, but I caution that it is a very developer and internals oriented talk.  If you are not familiar with transaction IDs, snapshots, XMINs, XMAXs, the ProcArrayLock and other internals, this might not be the talk for you.  If you aren’t up for the hacking talk then perhaps check out Gianni’s **Advanced** SQL talk, or take a break and listen to Federico talk about Large-scale Backup Challenges.

In the next slot, my pick is Andreas Seltenreich’s talk on Hunting PostgreSQL Bugs with SQLSmith.  I’m always interested in finding new ways to test PostgreSQL and make sure that we are producing correct results.  For the last two slots of the day, I’m looking at Jehan-Guillaume (ioguix) de Rorthais’s talk on PAF: Auto Failover and More, followed by Michał Gutkowski and Rafal Hawrylak’s talk on PostgreSQL in TomTom, though Emre Hasegeli’s talk on Managing thousands of Database Servers also looks fantastic, and if you haven’t followed all the developments on Parallel Query, definitely check out Amit Kapila’s talk on it during that slot.

That pretty much wraps up Wednesday for us. Check back here for my next post which will give you a preview of my favorite talks that will happen on Thursday!