Highlights from PGConf.DE 2025

We joined the 9th edition of PGConf.DE in Berlin, held on May 8th and 9th at the Marriott Hotel. The event filled an entire floor with 347 attendees from across the PostgreSQL community for two full days of talks, hallway conversations, and satellite events. Xata was proud to support the conference as a Silver sponsor.

A splash of purple

We took advantage of our strong Berlin presence. Many of us call the city home, which made it easy to show up in numbers - our booth team was seven people strong. Our signature purple booth stood out on the floor, complemented by an intentionally inclusive mix of swag. Visitors picked up branded lip balms, folding fans, lens cleaners, sushi sets, tote bags, and hair clips.

Xata talks at PGConf.DE

Three members of the Xata team took the stage this year, each sharing a different angle on working with PostgreSQL at scale.

Monica’s talk, Best Practices for Creating Ephemeral Environments with PII for PostgreSQL, focused on strategies for handling sensitive data responsibly in short-lived environments. She shared practical insights on balancing developer productivity with security and compliance, an increasingly relevant challenge for modern data teams.

Gülçin delivered a deep dive into PostgreSQL internals with Anatomy of Table-Level Locks in PostgreSQL. Her talk broke down how table-level locks work, how to avoid unexpected blocking, and what to look out for in production environments. It drew a technically engaged audience and sparked great follow-up discussions in the hallway track.

Tudor presented How LLMs Help Us Manage PostgreSQL at Scale, introducing the Xata Agent, an open-source AI assistant we’ve been developing and using internally. The agent monitors PostgreSQL clusters using metrics, logs, and query analysis, with large language models helping to interpret the data and suggest next steps. (Note: the conference site lists an earlier version of the talk title and abstract.) Tudor’s presentation offered a glimpse into how we’re exploring AI tooling in database operations today.

Themes from the hallway track

Having a booth at a multi-day conference is a great learning opportunity. The timing of the event also coincided with our new “Postgres at Scale” relaunch, which opened the door to even more interesting discussions. Xata now offers instant copy-on-write data branches. We do data anonymization so that developer branches don’t accidentally contain PII. We’re also cloud-agnostic, you can use your own cloud account or stay on-prem. We separate storage from compute with a distributed storage system accessed over NVMe/TCP. Naturally, there were a lot of conversations about the news we shared, we had a rollup of all these shiny new features!

Our open-source tools like pgroll, pgstream, and Xata Agent also got a lot of attention. We spoke with people running Postgres in different environments, and our BYOC feature drew significant interest. The ability to keep your production Postgres where it is and create staging and dev environments in Xata is quite appealing.

Women in Postgres breakfast

On Friday morning we hosted the Women in Postgres Breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel restaurant, just across from the conference venue. This women-only gathering provided a relaxed and welcoming space for women in the Postgres community to connect over coffee, conversation, and a shared sense of purpose. Attendees were greeted with fresh flowers and a thoughtful gift: sterling silver butterfly earrings inspired by the Xata logo. A generous breakfast spread set the tone for an empowering start to the day. It was a meaningful opportunity to foster inclusion, build new relationships, and celebrate the contributions of women in our field.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth, attended a talk, or joined us for breakfast. It’s always a joy to spend time with the Postgres community. See you at the next one!